+++History of the Coptic Language +++

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Introduction
Records of the Ancient Egyptian language have been dated to 4200 B.C. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related to Hamitic (North African languages) and Semitic (such as Arabic and Hebrew) language groups. The language survives today in the Coptic language used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church and, increasingly, as the mother tongue of many Copts in Egypt and in the diaspora. Thus, the lifespan of the Egyptian language makes it the oldest recorded language known to modern man.

Development of the Egyptian Language
No language can last thousands of years without undergoing changes. These changes can be brought about by brute force, can be made to make the language easier and for many other reasons. Egyptian was no different and scholars group the Egyptian language into 5 major divisions:
1. Old Egyptian:
The language of Dynasties I-VIII, about 4200 to 2240 B.C. This may be taken to include the language of the Pyramid Texts. Otherwise, the surviving documents of this stage are mainly official or otherwise formal-funerary formulae and tomb-inscriptions, including some biographical texts. Old Egyptian passes with but little modification into Middle Egyptian.
2. Middle Egyptian:
Middle Egyptian, possibly the vernacular of Dynasties IX-XI about 2240-1990 B.C., was later contaminated with new popular elements. In the later form it survived for some monumental and literary purposes right down to Graeco-Roman times, while the earlier form was retained as the religious language.
3. Late Egyptian:
The vernacular of Dynasties XVIII-XXIV about 1573-715 B.C. exhibited chiefly in business documents and letters, but also in stories and other literary compositions, and to some extent also in the official monuments from Dyn. XIX onwards. There are few texts however wherein the vernacular shows itself unmixed with the 'classical' idiom of Middle Egyptian.
4. Demotic:
T his term is loosely applied to the language used in the books and documents written in the script known as Demotic from Dyn. XXV to late Roman times (715 B.C. to 470 A.D.) Here again the old 'classical' idiom is blended with later, vernacular elements, often inextricably.
5. Coptic:
The old Egyptian language in its latest developments, as written in the Coptic script, from the end of the first century A.D. onwards; so called because it was spoken by the Copts, the Christian descendants of the Ancient Egyptians. After the Arab conquest (641 A.D.) Coptic was gradually superseded by Arabic, and became almost extinct as a spoken tongue in the sixteenth century. Coptic is written in the Greek Alphabet supplemented by seven special characters derived ultimately from the hieroglyphs. Coptic has experienced a great renaissance over the last century.

The Ancient Egyptian Language
Egyptian is a fairly typical Afro-Asiatic language. At the heart of Egyptian vocabulary was a root of three consonants. Sometimes there were only two, for example "rA" (sun); and some could be as large as five "sxdxd" (be upside-down). Vowels and other consonants were then added to this root in order to derive words. However, we do not know what these vowels would have been, since like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian does not write vowels; hence "ankh" could represent either "life", "to live" or "living". In transcription, /a/, /i/ and /u/ all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamen was written in Egyptian /twt 'nkh ymn/ (the apostrophe represents a glottal stop). Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values in order to make the words pronounceable.
Egyptian's basic word order is Verb Subject Object; where English-speakers would write "the man opens the door", Egyptians would say "opens the man the door". The early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles, no words for "the" or "a"; later forms used the words /pA/, /tA/ and /nA/ for this purpose. Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to French and Irish Gaelic; it also uses three grammatical numbers: like most other Afro-Asiatic languages, it contrasts singular, dual and plural forms. When saying something like "the man is red", the word "red" (dSrt in Egyptian) acts as a predicative verb.
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal consonants, in a distribution rather similar to that of Arabic.

The Ancient Egyptian Script
The Ancient Egyptians devised a writing system to record their spoken language over 60 centuries ago. The first application seems to have been the calendar. The system started by giving each word a symbol, called a hieroglyph. Most people refer to the hieroglyphs when they speak about Egyptian writing. A hieroglyph is a picture of a real object, but hieroglyphs can be used in three distinct ways: as what they represent, as a concept related to what they represent or as the sound of the word they represent. For example, a picture of the sun may be taken to be the sun itself, light or heat (because the sun is both a luminary body and provides heat) or as the sound "sun". The later stages of Egyptian (Middle and Late) use hieroglyphs almost solely in the third usage, while Demotic and Coptic completely abandoned the use of hieroglyphs. This convention was of course doomed because of the tremendous vocabulary it would have generated. Out of such ideas they took some of these hieroglyphs and associated a sound value to them which, when combined together, would spell out the spoken word. The sound values of such characters depended mostly on the pronunciation of the word that it denoted in the early stage. Thus the hieroglyph for mouth, pronounced 'ro' became the sound 'r' in the new system. About 130 hieroglyphs have been identified as voiced characters. Some represented a single sound, others a two-character sound, and some a three-character sound. Many more hieroglyphs were added to represent the idea or to enhance the meaning of the word. These are commonly referred to as ideograms and they brought the number of identified hieroglyphs to over 4,000. This script, popularly called hieroglyphic, was both beautifully drawn as well colorfully painted. It was used for inscription on Egyptian monuments as well as a variety of written texts on papyrus.
Records show that hieroglyphic writing underwent the most significant changes during the Old Egyptian period. During the Middle Egyptian era, hieroglyphic stabilised and these hieroglyphs remained the same up until the disappearance of hieroglyphic. Therefore, one only needs to learn Middle Egyptian hieroglyphic to understand the vast majority of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Hieroglyphic was used for all forms of written communication during the Old and Middle Egyptian eras. However, hieroglyphic was reserved for important religious texts during the Demotic era and was rarely found during the Coptic stage of Egyptian. The latest hieroglyphs known are at Philae and dated to 394 A.D. The next latest show the names of the Roman emperors Diocletian (yr. 12, 295A.D.) and Traianus Decius (249-251 A.D.)
As explained previously, the majority of hieroglyphs seen in any particular text do not represent the objects they depict. They mostly represent sounds or were used as "determinatives" to show what type of word was being used. Hieroglyphic could be written in the following ways:
1. Horizontal, left-to-right;
2. Horizontal, right-to-left;
3. Vertical, facing left-to-right;
4. Vertical, facing right-left.
Written, cursive hieroglyphic is generally written in columns, top-to-bottom or horizontally, right-to-left. In the latter stages of hieroglyphic cursive the only surviving examples are written horizontally, right-to-left; vertical hieroglyphic should be read from top-to-bottom.
It is generally an easy task to determine which way to read the hieroglyphs even if you are unable to understand their meaning. Hieroglyphs with a definite front and back (for example, a person) will generally:
1. Face the beginning of the sentence;
2. Face the same direction as any person or large object in a picture they describe
As an example, if a tableau contains a picture of a man seated and facing right, then all the hieroglyphs with a definite front and back would face to the right as well. The actual hieroglyphs would be read from right-to-left because these images almost always face the beginning of the sentence. Hieroglyphic texts that do not display this behaviour are said to be in retrograde. Once one understands hieroglyphic it is easy to determine if one is examining a retrograde text because it will simply make no sense at all! As an aid to reading, and perhaps to the Ancient Egyptian's sense of aesthetics, hieroglyphs were also packed together into neat patterns. In general, two or more short or thin (depending on which direction one was writing the hieroglyphs) would be written in the same block as each other. Occasionally, a tall or wide symbol would be made smaller and placed with another short or thin hieroglyph. Finally, hieroglyphic had no standard punctuation. Religious texts generally have no punctuation at all, whilst texts from the latter part of the Ancient Egyptian language have full stops between important lines of thought.
In parallel with the development of the hieroglyphic script, a second script came to light. Such script was a mere simplification of the artistic, and sometimes laborious, hieroglyphic. It was originally devised by the priests to record the records of the temples and then became a tool of the government servants, educated by the learned priests, who used it to record the affairs of the state. Due to the priestly origin of the script the name hieretic (=priestly) was popularly affixed to it. This script used the same symbols, drawn in a simplified way. There is no indication that script had as many ideograms as the hieroglyphic had.
With the decline of the state such a cumbersome writing method became impossible to preserve it as is. So in the fifth century B.C. a new script was devised that was both simpler to write and included about ten percent of the total number of hieroglyphs previously used. This new script came to be referred to as demotic. The cursive, and relatively ugly appearance of characters, in comparison to the hieroglyphic, was compensated for by its relative compactness. Many written records were preserved in that script but they dared not inscribe it on temple walls.

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Decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian Language
Until recently, given the time span we are talking about, the decipherment of the hieroglyphic characters was hampered because those attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs assigned emotional meanings to the actual symbols used. For example, some people believed that the hieroglyph for son, a goose, was chosen because geese love their sons above all other animals. This hieroglyph was chosen, though, simply because the word for goose once had the same sound as the word for son. A further impediment was the lack of complementary material, that is to say material of the same work written in close proximity to another translation.
Athanasius Kircher, a student of Coptic, developed the notion that this last stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphic he could not prove this notion. However, in 1799 when the discovery of the Rosetta Stone occurred, scholars finally had an example of hieroglyphic, demotic and Ancient Greek that they were all reasonably certain were the translations of the same passage. In the hieroglyphic script, the name of the King or Pharaoh and God's names are often placed within a circle called a cartouche. Jean-François Champollion, a young French scholar, demonstrated how the name Kleopatra could be made in hieroglyphic. Furthermore, by using an impressive knowledge of Coptic, he surmised that a number of symbols showing everyday objects could be pronounced as in Coptic. Applying this knowledge to other, well-known hieroglyphic sources clearly confirmed Champollion's work and linguistic scholars now had a way to work with and delineate the language into nouns, verbs, prepositions and other grammatical parts.

Modern Day Resources
Interest in the Ancient Egyptian Language continues. For example, it is still taught in the Oxford University in London and other places. Many resources are furthermore in French, German or Italian, and not just in English. In the movie Stargate, a linguist was commissioned to develop a constructed language to simulate the tongue of ancient Egyptians living alone in another planet for millennia. While Egyptian culture, through the Greek culture, has deeply influenced the Western civilization, few words of Egyptian origin remain in English. Even those associated with Ancient Egypt were usually transmitted in Greek forms.

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Definition
The Coptic Language is the name used to refer to the last stage of the written Egyptian language. Coptic should more correctly be used to refer to the script rather than the language itself. Even though this script was introduced as far back as the 2nd century B.C., it is usually applied to the writing of the Egyptian language from the first century AD. to the present day.

Origin of the Coptic Script
In 313 BC. Alexander the Great invaded Egypt. His legacy was carried on by his general Ptolemeus and his successors in Egypt. That legacy, simply stated, was to have a universal culture. Such culture would be the Hellenistic one; a mixture of the Greek Hellenic culture and the Eastern Egyptian one. With the culture comes the language, so it became the proper way for the educated classes to learn Greek and encourage their children to learn it for their economical as well as the social advantages. In script, the Greek was far superior to the Demotic, the last surviving Egyptian script at the time. It offered 24 characters all pronounceable as opposed to over 400 symbols that only a small percentage represented sounds and the rest were ideograms.
It is important to note here that the Greeks learned their writing system from the Egyptians through the frequent travelers of the ancient world, the Phoenicians. In the course of their commercial dealings with the Egyptians, the Phoenicians imported the Egyptian script and molded it into an alphabet with a far smaller number of characters, all pronounceable and all consonants. As they traveled the Mediterranean and traded with the inhabitants of the Greek Isles, they gave their version of the Egyptian writing system to the Greeks. They in turn revised its orthography and added a number of written vowels. A system that eventually became the basis for the new Egyptian script: the Coptic.
The pagan Egyptian priests, as a result of the invasion of the Greek language, found themselves at a disadvantage. The source of income as well as the power of their temples depended a great deal on the making and the sales of magical amulets. Now these amulets, written in Egyptian, can not be pronounced by those who can afford to pay for them. If they can not use them, properly or at all, it is safe to say that they would not be bought. To avert such economic and religious massacre, they reverted to a transliteration system of these amulets. This new system used the Greek characters along with several other characters borrowed from the Demotic to denote sounds not available in Greek. The economic success of such system made them extend its use to other applications such as horoscopes and the like. The number of borrowed Demotic characters eventually were reduced. The resultant script was highly standardized, in the common tradition of the Ancient Egyptians.

Coptic Script in Christian Egypt
Christianity in Egypt owes its formal introduction to St. Mark the Evangelist. He came first to Alexandria in the early fifties of the first century AD., accompanying his uncle St. Barnabas. After the repose of St. Barnabas in Cyprus, St. Mark came again by himself and started preaching the word of God among the Jews. The legacy that St. Mark left in Egypt was a Christian community made up primarily of converted hellenized Jews. Christianity remained eclipsed by the powerful Jewish community in Alexandria at the time. After the Jewish Revolt in the first quarter of the second century AD. and subsequent annihilation of the Jews in Alexandria, the Christians of Egypt became visible to the world.
The first visible signs of such presence were rather blemishing to the character of the Church. Two teachers of Gnostic, heterodox repute, traveled abroad at different times during the middle of the second century AD. They were Basilides and Valentinus. The latter became infamous due to his quest to be the bishop of Rome. In any case, these teachers influenced the arrival of Pantanus, the missionary, presumably to introduce the orthodox teachings of Christianity to a seemingly Gnostic community. After his arrival he discovered that this was not exactly the case and there was a strong orthodox community present as a result of the evangelizing work of St. Mark and his successors. Being a renowned Christian teacher he was put in charge of the Christian school of Alexandria, a rather small school that taught those who are willing to serve the Lord the fundamentals of Christianity. Shortly after his arrival, St. Demetrius, the first bishop of Egyptian origin, became the Patriarch of Alexandria about 189 AD.
The contact between Pantaenus, the missionary, and St. Demetrius the representative of the large and mostly non-Christian Egyptians was truly a match made in Heaven. As a result a missionary movement to convert the Egyptian peasants began. The School of Alexandria probably became a school to prepare the missionaries and direct their activities.
The dilemma faced by those responsible for directing such missionary work was the uniformity of the message to be given to the Egyptians. The missionaries knew how to read Greek but not Demotic. The Egyptian peasants did not know how to read either but they understood the sounds of the language written by the Demotic script, i.e. Egyptian. To insure that the Word of God, written in the Scriptures, be preached the same by the different missionaries, it had to be written in a way that the missionaries can read and the Egyptians can understood when it was read to them. So the missionaries translated the Scriptures into the Egyptian tongue but wrote them using the Greek characters they are familiar with. These attempts differed from those of the pagans in that they did not use any Demotic character in the beginning. The shortcomings of that system were eventually realized and more characters, borrowed from the Demotic, were added to bring them to the current six or seven additional characters that survived in the Sahidic and Bohairic dialects respectively. Some letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may have come from Coptic.

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Dialects
Now we see two independent attempts to write the Egyptian language in new script. Each attempt was unique in its motive, approach, and audience. Due to the distribution of the population along the length of the Nile, many dialects developed. Each was characterized by the use of different vowels in pronouncing the same words as well as some distinct variation in the vocabulary. The pagans attempted from the start to develop a uniform written language in a neutral Dialect, the Sahidic. Because of their early start, they were successful in their efforts and nearly erased any influence that such regional dialects had on their own version of Coptic. The Christians on the other hand put the benefit of the people ahead of proper language development and resurrected all these regional dialects in a written form. Eventually most of these dialects fell into disuse as the uniform Sahidic became the more dominant again.
All the dialects were to a large extent geographically-dependent. Their spanned the entire length of the Nile Valley. Based on literary records we have such dialects as the Akhmimic and the Lycopolitan (Asyutic) dialects of Upper Egypt, the Middle Egyptian and the Fayoumic of Middle Egypt, and the Bohairic of the Delta. Then there is the Sahidic dialect that became, from the earliest times, a neutral dialect used throughout Egypt and eventually gained literary dominance with the extensive writings of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite. There is also a host of minor dialects as well as subdialects to the ones mentioned above.
Today Bohairic is the only surviving dialect of Coptic. It was kept alive first by the strength of the monastic communities of Wadi n' Natrun (Scitis), which used it extensively. Then with the move of the Patriarchate from Alexandria to Cairo in the 11th century, Bohairic, the dialect of the District, became the official dialect of the Church replacing the Sahidic.

The Golden age of Coptic
Coptic was used from its Christian beginnings in the late second century A.D. till the time of the Great persecution of Diocletian in the early 4th century A.D. predominantly as a translational tool from Greek to Egyptian. After the persecution, the monastic movement picked up tremendous steam. It was for the Copts the only way they can express their great love for God, that they earlier expressed with the willing sacrifice of their most precious possession, their earthly lives. These monastic communities were large and mostly Egyptian. This generated the need for the abbots of these communities to write their rules in their Egyptian language. Furthermore, the Fathers of the Egyptian Church, who otherwise usually wrote in Greek, addressed some of their works to the Egyptian monks in Coptic.
Hence, with monastic fathers like St. Antony, St. Pachomius, and St. Macarius and their respective disciples writing to their monks; and with Church Fathers like St. Athanasius, St. Theophilius, and St. Cyril writing also to them in Coptic, the Golden Age of the Coptic language was about to begin.
It was not until St. Shenouda the Archimandrite came on the scene that Coptic really achieved its literary excellence. St. Shenouda who lived from 348 to 466 AD. was able to transform the language from a tool to communicate instructions to the monks to a wide-variety literary language that addressed monks, ecclesiastic authorities, laymen, and even government officials. His charisma, knowledge of Greek language and rhetoric, and his innovative mind gave him the necessary tools to elevate the Coptic language, in content and style, to a literary height never achieved before nor equaled since. The Coptic scholars are constantly astounded by his great writings as more and more of them are being studied and accurately published.
This literary legacy continued to a lesser degree through the writings of his disciple St. Besa in the second half of the fifth century. But such writings were mostly for the edification of the large monastic community in the White Monastery. Later in the sixth and seventh centuries other fathers wrote many works in Coptic like Rufus of Shotep, Constantine of Asyut, and Pisentius of Qift.

Coptic During the Early Arabic Period (7th to 10th Century A.D.)
By the middle of the seventh century, Egypt came under the dominance of Arab rulers that eventually tried to force the Copts to learn Arabic to keep their government jobs. This policy slowly eroded the number of Coptic lay readers who were mostly from the ranks of these government workers and their families. In other words the pressure put on such families to learn Arabic to ensure their continuing service in the government and the inheritance of such work by their offspring, made them slowly neglect educating their children in literary Coptic. Within a few hundred years Bishop Severus of Al-Ashmunain found it necessary to write his 'History of the Patriarchs' in Arabic to address such a drastic decline.
Ecclesiastically, the language continued strong. In fact, a great number of Hagiographic texts were composed during the early parts of this period. Coptic continued to be used in the Church with Greek as the second language, as seen from the texts that survived from the period. However a relatively small number of liturgical manuscripts survived from such period to show how it was being used. This was due to the heavy use that such manuscripts were subjected to, poor preservation during the period of decline in use, and the parchment material they were written on that did not lend itself to such heavy use.
During this period some Arabic loan-words made their way into the language. But there was no indication that the Arabic language was used in the Church. There were no Coptic-Arabic manuscripts that belong to this period or any literary citation to indicate its possible use. Coptic also remained the spoken language of the peasants and probably the clergy.

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Coptic versus Arabic (from 11th to 14th Century A.D.)
As the 11th century approached, the relatively good relations between the rulers of Egypt and the Church were drastically changed as the Hakem-bi-Amr-Allah became the ruler. His violent mood swings took their toll on the Christians who were periodically subjected to open persecutions, had their churches closed for up to two years at time, and saw their language being prohibited from use. Through God's grace, this period did not last long, but it definitely left open the door for further decline in Coptic use.
During the same period, the European Crusaders waged their wars against the Moslem rulers of the Middle East in an effort to secure the holy places. Their presence in the area generated waves of persecutions and oppressions against the Copts. This was due to the Moslems seeing in the sign of the Cross, displayed by the Crusaders, an implied alliance of the Copts with those invaders and a great threat to the country. Of course there was no chance of such alliance, for the Crusaders considered the Copts as heretics and treated them worse than they treated the Moslems, as sad as it might sounds. Introduction of Arabic in the 12th century by Patriarch Gabriel ibn Turaik was probably an attempt to show the Moslems that the Copts are different from the enemy they were fighting.
Such move may have been considered wise at the time but it actually opened the flood gates. Christian Arabic literature flourished afterward. Later in the period, Arabic invaded the liturgical books, replacing Greek in bilingual texts and intruding on traditionally non-bilingual ones. Even purely Arabic liturgical texts began to appear, indicating that Arabic moved from a mere reference translation to actual use in the churches. Original composition in Coptic became limited to liturgical hymns and prayers. The only Coptic literary texts composed in the later part of the period were the martyrdom of St. John of Phanidijoit, written as such to shield from the eyes of the Moslems, and compositions, urging the Copts to revive their language.
Further testimony to the gradual decline of the language as a reading tool was supplied by the many lexicographic works that were introduced during the period. They were in the form of Muqadimat (Grammar) and Salalem (Scalae or word lists). Another sign of decline was Arabic texts circulating among the monks but written in Coptic characters, as they could not still read the Arabic script. This eventually was replaced with the writing of Coptic text in Arabic letters that we see nowadays in the Coptic Church.
In summary, this period saw the decline of Coptic literary use in its last stronghold, the Church. Eventually, it led to the weakening of the Church which subsequently weakened the language more, a natural chain reaction. The number of Christians declined due to persecution and conversion to Islam. This can probably be attributed to the decline in Coptic which represented a cultural barrier for the Copts from the Arabic-Moslem Culture. But now the increasing use of Arabic bridged that barrier and made it easier for the border-line Christians to cross to seemingly greener grounds!

Coptic Decline as a Spoken Language (to 17th Century A.D.)
After the 14th century the Church experienced a decline spiritually and numerically. The dominance of the Ottoman Empire over Egypt in the early 16th century seemed to accelerate such decline. Production of Coptic Manuscripts slowed down to a trickle. This is an indication that Coptic books were not used as often as before in the Church, so there was no need to produce more. Tradition still mandated that Coptic be used in Church services but in a decaying fashion. Eventually Vansleb, the French traveler, concluded upon seeing an old man speaking in Coptic that with his death (the man's) Coptic will die. Such observation may not have been completely accurate but it gave an indication that Arabic has replaced Coptic as the primary spoken language among the Copts, if not the only one!

Revival of Coptic in the 19th Century A.D.
God, in His great mercy, did not let that decline goes unchecked. In His usual fashion, He brought forth a gleam of light in the midst of that self-imposed darkness. Such light was St. Cyril IV, Patriarch of Alexandria in the beginning years of the second half of the 19th century. St. Cyril started a Church-sponsored movement to educate the clergy and the new generations. Revival of Coptic seemed to be a necessary tool for such a movement. So Coptic language education was offered in all the schools that he built alongside the other curriculums that was needed to make a new, better, and educated generation.
St. Cyril did not last long on the throne of St. Mark. In fact too short of time for such a great figure in Church history. His death was in part brought upon by opponents of his reforms. But he haid laid the ground work for such movement to continue. In the last half quarter of that century the movement to revive the Coptic language intensified. The eyes of those in that movement turned to Greece in an effort to establish a standardized method of pronouncing Coptic. It was felt that Greek preserved the original sound value of many of the characters in Coptic because of its close association with Coptic in its early days. However the Greek tongue underwent some modifications due to the effect of 150 years of Turkish (Ottoman) dominance. Because of the lack of any other available means, a new pronunciation system was established for Coptic that made it sounds not as Egyptian as it should have sounded.
In spite of the above shortcoming, those dedicated people spread the language among the masses. They printed many of the Coptic service books for the first time, as they were only extant in manuscript form. Thus reviving the use of Coptic in the Church services. Several works of grammar were produced as a result, along with a more comprehensive dictionary than was then available. The establishment of the Clerical College also aided in the propagation of the movement.

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Coptic in the 20th Century
Coptic continued its growth in the Church and among the Ecclesiastically-educated groups that were produced in the early parts of the 20th century. Coptic schools, instituted by St. Cyril IV and others that emulated them, continued their valuable work among the Coptic community. The clerical college also continued the tradition of the 19th century revival of Coptic. However, the pronunciation system established seemed to be a hindrance to the spread of the language among the masses. With the advent of the revolution of 1952, Arabic became more prominent in Egypt and eventually it had an influential effect on the new educated classes among the Copts. As members of these groups were called upon to serve the Church, they brought with them a preaching spirit that put Arabic in a new prominent position in the services, i.e. sermons. Unintentionally, and in spite of the good will of such people and their love of the tradition of the Church, they introduced again an element that eventually weakened the revival process. If such process is not wisely put in check and eventually reversed, we are liable to face in the future a Church with a lost identity.


Sources
www.coptic.org/language/stshenouda1.htm
www.fact-index.com/e/eg/egyptian_language.html
www.geocities.com/remenkimi/gardner1.htm