arabic overtook coptic as the language most used in egypt in the early modern period.
arabic overtook coptic as the language most used in egypt in the early modern period.
when did arabic overtake coptic as the language most used in egypt?
the early modern period
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"of the extant versions of the work," writes kuhn, "the coptic is, no doubt, the primary." as noted above, the first translator of the work into a modern language amélineau thought the work originally was composed in coptic, and mingana at several points in his translation calls attention to a likely coptic predecessor. yet, it is coquin who has conducted the most thorough investigation of the dependence of the arabic version on the coptic. though virtually all the surviving manuscripts are arabic, none is earlier than the fifteenth century. the oldest, dated manuscript from those witnesses, paris bn syr. 238 (dated 1474 ce), which was mentioned above, shows a clear debt to a coptic version. among other things, it twice reproduces, rather awkwardly, the number 40 using the cursive coptic character rather than the word, clearly indicating there was no understanding of the egyptian model. amélineau had already observed that in bm or. 3599 the arabic translator transposes well-known topography of alexandria to that of ancient jerusalem; thus, instead of "benjamin's gate," one finds "the gate of the sun." furthermore, many garshuni manuscripts refer to the egyptian month parmoute (= barmoudah) and by doing this, as coquin observes, they "betray their source, if not immediate, at least that of their archetype, because, one would not read such a name of month in a text written by a syriac-speaking christian." there is also a strange scribal error in paris bn syr. 65, which yields the curious reading that "zedekiah the king relapsed in sin before the lord; he entered the house of the lord and took out the two marble columns that illuminate without a torch and put them "in the pool" that was before the idols of baal and zeus." following which, "he set for himself a table near "the pool" of baal and zeus." the word "pool" ("birka") here is incongruous and the result of a scribe not understanding the word "birba", a rare word borrowed from coptic in christian arabic of egypt (= π (coptic article masculine) + ρ π ε (= temple)), which a non-egyptian arabic-speaking person could not understand, and thus slightly altered, leaving a rather odd narrative. despite the detailed work by coquin, kuhn, and piovanelli, it is the late and inaccurate arabic version that is still used by many researchers.
history of the captivity in babylon