Old Nubian Orthography as Evidence for Dating the Coptic Double Vowel Convention’s Usage as a Marker of Long Vowels
The following is an expansion of a years-long research project on Greek poetry and magic as likely sources of inspiration for Coptic vowel orthography (Mihalyfy 2025) , to gather further feedback in preparation for an article to be submitted for peer review. . . . Especially when positing sound changes and reconstructing vocalism, scholarship on Egyptian-Coptic historical linguistics must take a position on the Coptic double vowel convention found in words like Ⲛ︦ⲦⲞⲞⲦ︦Ϥ ‘from him’: What is represented by sequences like that repeated omicron? Two major positions are represented in scholarship (e.g. Peust 1999: 205-210): 1) The repetition signals a vowel followed by a glottal stop; and 2) The repetition signals a long vowel. Coptic orthography was in use for somewhere around a millennium, while Egyptian was still a living language (Richter 2009). Thus, the sheer amount of texts and their often-staggering diversity can make it hard to put forward a simple and all-illuminatin...