Editing Coptic script (section)

== Form ==
The Coptic script was the first Egyptian writing system to indicate [[vowels]], making Coptic documents invaluable for the interpretation of earlier Egyptian texts. Some Egyptian syllables had [[sonorant]]s but no vowels; in Sahidic, these were written in Coptic with a line above the entire syllable. Various scribal schools made limited use of diacritics: some used an apostrophe as a [[word divider]] and to mark [[clitic]]s, a function of [[determinative]]s in [[logogram|logographic]] Egyptian; others used [[Diaeresis (diacritic)|diereses]] over {{coptic|ⲓ}} and {{coptic|ⲩ}} to show that these started a new syllable, others a [[circumflex]] over any vowel for the same purpose.<ref name=D&B>Ritner, Robert Kriech. 1996. "The Coptic Alphabet". In ''The World's Writing Systems'', edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1994:287–290.</ref>

The Coptic script's glyphs are largely based on the Greek alphabet, another help in interpreting older Egyptian texts,<ref>Campbell, George L. "Coptic." Compendium of the World's Writing Systems. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Biddles LTD, 1991. 415.</ref> with 24 letters of Greek origin; 6 or 7 more were retained from [[Demotic (Egyptian)|Demotic]], depending on the dialect (6 in Sahidic, another each in Bohairic and Akhmimic).<ref name=D&B/> In addition to the alphabetic letters, the letter ϯ stood for the syllable {{IPA|/ti/}} or {{IPA|/di/}}.

As the Coptic script is simply a [[typeface]] of the Greek alphabet,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.ancientscripts.com/coptic.html|title=Coptic|website=Ancient Scripts|access-date=2 December 2017}}</ref> with a few added letters, it can be used to write Greek without any transliteration schemes. Latin equivalents would include the [[Icelandic orthography|Icelandic alphabet]] (which likewise has added letters), or the [[Fraktur]] alphabet (which has distinctive forms). While initially unified with the Greek alphabet by [[Unicode]], a proposal was later accepted to separate it, with the proposal noting that Coptic is never written using modern Greek letter-forms (unlike German, which may be written with Fraktur or Roman [[Antiqua (typeface class)|Antiqua]] letter-forms), and that the Coptic letter-forms have closer mutual legibility with the Greek-based letters incorporated into the separately encoded [[Cyrillic alphabet]] than with the forms used in modern Greek. Because Coptic lowercases are usually small-caps forms of the capitals, a Greek would have little trouble reading Coptic letters, but Copts would struggle more with many of the Greek letters.<ref>{{cite web|title=L2/02-205 N2444: Coptic supplementation in the BMP|date=2002-05-08|first1=Michael|last1=Everson|first2=Kamal|last2=Mansour|url=https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02205-n2444-coptic.pdf}}</ref><ref>For example: The composer's name "Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich" is Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович in Cyrillic, and Ⲇⲙⲏⲧⲣⲓⲓ Ⲇⲙⲏⲧⲣⲓⲉⲃⲓϭ Ϣⲟⲥⲧⲁⲕⲟⲃⲓϭ in Coptic.</ref>