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Coptic is the most recent phase of ancient Egyp­tian. It is the direct des­cend­ant of the ancient lan­guage writ­ten in Egyp­tian hiero­glyphic, hier­atic, and demotic scripts. The Coptic alpha­bet is a slightly mod­i­fied form of the Greek alpha­bet, with some let­ters (which vary from dia­lect to dia­lect) deriv­ing from demotic. As a living lan­guage of daily con­ver­sa­tion, Coptic flour­ished from ca. 200 to 1100. The last record of its being spoken was during the 17th cen­tury. Coptic sur­vives today as the litur­gical lan­guage of the Coptic Ortho­dox Church. Egyp­tian Arabic is the spoken and national lan­guage of Egypt today.

Source: Wiki­pe­dia on Coptic Language

Coptic, as used today, has signs of influ­ence from the Greek lan­guage. If you speak Greek, you should be able to recog­nise every entry in the screen­shot (it comes from the dic­tion­ary that is avail­able from http://​copticlang.​bizhat.com/).

There is a Coptic Uni­code block and there are at least three Uni­code fonts avail­able with Coptic glyphs.

I am not aware of a key­board defin­i­tion to write Uni­code Coptic; Coptic uses sev­eral com­bin­ing dia­crit­ical marks (accents) and appears to sur­pass even Ancient Greek/Polytonic in this respect. An easy way to create (easy to write with?) method would be to start from the Greek key­board layout and replace the code­points with the Coptic ones. For the 9 com­bin­ing dia­crit­ical marks, three keys should be ded­ic­ated, access­ible through 1) press­ing as is, 2) press­ing with shift, 3) press­ing with Alt. To avoid using dead keys, there would be a require­ment to type first the letter and then the dia­crit­ical mark.

In modern Greek we use the “;:” key (on the right of L) to pro­duce the acute and the diaer­esis (with Shift) accents. The second suit­able key could be the ‘ ” key while the third the “/?” (debateable).

There are sev­eral efforts to con­vert non-​Unicode fonts dis­trib­uted by the Coptic Church. web­site. Moheb added the Coptic glyphs to the Freefonts. There is more work required to get them added by default to Linux dis­tros. There is a dis­cus­sion forum on Coptic.

There­fore, the most import­ant task is to create a key­board layout so that one can write in Uni­code Coptic.

Then, exist­ing (non-​Unicode) text should be con­ver­ted to Uni­code Coptic so that there is mater­ial avail­able. Moheb cre­ated sup­port for this in iconv (glibc). There should be a bug report at http://​sources.​red​hat.​com/​b​u​g​zilla/ under product glibc, com­pon­ent libc.

Source: Wiki­pe­dia (Coptic script)

There exist free Uni­code fonts already to have the text dis­played. The con­ver­sion of the Coptic Church fonts to Uni­code would be bene­fi­cial as well. To have them included in Linux dis­tros, the dis­tri­bu­tion license should be set to one of the FLOSS licenses. An option could be to add to the DejaVu fonts (allowed by the license) so that there is a gen­eral pur­pose open font that is easy to work with.

I, for one, would love to write Greek using a Coptic key­board layout and a Coptic Uni­code font.

Update: Screen­shot that demon­strates how well Uni­code Coptic fonts behave when com­bin­ing marks are used.

Update #2: You can test the above on your system by open­ing this Open­Doc­u­ment file using Open​Of​fice.org or any other OpenDocument-​compatible applic­a­tion. Open​Of​fice.org was veri­fied that it can show com­bin­ing marks. Your mileage may vary, your com­ments will be appreciated.

Get Uni­code fonts with Coptic coverage.

Tags: blog, gnome, i18n, language, polytonic //