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. 

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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-illuminating stance, especially in the face of scattered textual oddities – for instance, the strange use of double vowels when rendering some Arabic words containing gutturals (Van Putten 2018: 87 and 93), or manuscripts with unit division markers that appear between the two vowels (Depuydt 2018: 326).

That said – and in contradiction to what is taught in many introductory textbooks (e.g. Lambdin 1983: xiii and  Layton 2007: 8)  – the most reasonable default position is to understand this double vowel convention as a marker of long vowels. Arguments are many, but one simple and immediately intelligible line of reasoning hinges on the varyingly-written word ⲤⲀⲦⲈⲈⲢⲈ ‘stater,’ an “early naturalized loan word” from the Greek στατήρ (Peust 1999: 210).

It simply makes no sense for speakers of Egyptian to take a perfectly good Greek word and its CVC sequence and then begin inserting a glottal stop in there!

It is indeed true that earlier stages of Egyptian indicate that sometimes /r/ or other sounds once existed in that space where the double vowel convention resides in words like Ⲛ︦ⲦⲞⲞⲦ︦Ϥ ‘from him.’ Yet, this could be understood not as weakening of the sound to a glottal stop, but rather as sound-disappearance, leaving compensatory lengthening in its wake (Peust 1999: 208, 235-237).

Nevertheless, into all of this reasoning, an interesting point has recently been made (Richter 2023: 12-13; cf. Peust 1999: 210 on “attempts to find an intermediate solution”):

Couldn’t *both* positions be true, and the double vowel convention *began* as a glottal stop, but that glottal stop disappeared while Coptic orthography was in use, leaving the convention functioning as a long vowel marker?

Here, Old Nubian orthography could be important evidence, although previous scholars do not seem to have considered its importance in relation to the debate over the Coptic double vowel convention (an honest question: have they, somewhere, and I just haven’t come across the discussion?).

Standard treatments of Old Nubian indicate that it took over the double vowel convention from Coptic (Browne 2002: 7, 15; Gerven Oei 2021: 33-37). Furthermore, the modern Nobiin and other related languages contain long vowels in cognates, strongly suggesting that the double vowel convention probably represented a long vowel in Old Nubian (Browne 2002: 15; Gerven Oei 2021: 400). To date the consolidation of Old Nubian orthography, its inclusion of a handful of Meroitic signs with values similar to those of Meroitic indicates that this must have occurred when Meroitic literacy still plausibly existed, “not too long after the collapse of the kingdom of Kush in the 3^rd/4^th c. CE” and “predat[ing] the Christianization of Nubia in the 6^th c. CE” (Gerven Oei 2021: 26, 33). Although as of now the earliest datable surviving text is from 795 CE (Gerven Oei 2021: 2), copies of some manuscripts likely date back to earlier periods (Gerven Oei 2021: 26), and between the two it seems reasonable to posit the double vowel convention as a feature of earlier texts. Thus, if specialists of Old Nubian continue to uphold these positions, and if it does not turn out that Old Nubian somehow began incorporating the double vowel convention at some later point in its history, it also makes sense to logically deduce that the double vowel convention of Coptic orthography was used to represent long vowels at the time of script transfer and consolidation, somewhere in the range of the 3^rd - 5^th c. CE.

Thus, if the Coptic double vowel convention *ever* represented a vowel followed by a glottal stop, it must have quickly shifted its function very early on during the history of Coptic orthography.

In this regard, one wonders about the earliest attestation of the varyingly-written word ⲤⲀⲦⲈⲈⲢⲈ where it was written with a double vowel. For instance, if it was found in a securely dated 4^th c. CE or even rare 3^rd c. CE text, such an attestation would help narrow the window for the double vowel convention to represent a vowel followed by a glottal stop, perhaps almost to the point of disappearance.

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 David Mihalyfy is an independent scholar with a B.A. in Linguistics (Harvard, ’02) and a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity (UChicago ’17).

In a not uncommon scholarly trajectory, he first became interested in Afroasiatic historical linguistics because he happened to study one language (Coptic, for Christian texts), and soon realized the relative underdevelopment of diachronic knowledge in comparison to Indo-European languages.

He has presented at several Egyptological Symposiums of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, as well as remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. Several short articles from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian were recently published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.

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WORKS CITED:

Gerald M. Browne, Old Nubian Grammar (Munich: Lincom Europa, 2002).

Leo Depuydt, “In Pascal’s and Boole’s Footsteps: Measuring the Mathematical Probability of Genetic Kinship Between Language Families (with a Note on Chadic),” in M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli (eds.), Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018), 321-345.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian (Louvain: Peeters, 2021).

Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Sahidic Coptic (1983; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000 reprint).

Bentley Layton, Coptic in Twenty Lessons: Introduction to Sahidic Coptic with Exercises and Vocabularies (Leuven: Peeters, 2007).

David Mihalyfy, “Greek Poetry and Magic as Likely Sources for Coptic Vowel Orthography,” Workshop for Egyptian Historical Linguistics (30 March 2025), available at https://egyptianhistoricallinguistics.blogspot.com/2025/03/greek-poetry-and-magic-as-sources-for.html.

Carsten Peust, Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language (Göttingen: Peust & Gutschmidt Verlag, 1999).

Tonio Sebastian Richter, “Greek, Coptic, and the ‘language of the Hijra’: the rise and decline of the Coptic language in late antique and medieval Egypt,” in Hannah M. Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price, and David J. Wasserstein (eds.), From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East, edited by (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 401-446. Cambridge. Available at http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/volltexte/2018/4212.

------, “Coptic,” in Andréas Stauder and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (published 1 February 2023), available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22r6s881.

Marijn van Putten, “Copto-Arabica: The Phonology of Early Islamic Arabic Based on Coptic Transcriptions,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 171.1 (2021): 81-100.