Friday, February 13, 2009

Coptic at Harvard

So I started attending this Coptic class at Harvard School of Divinity. The instructor allowed me to attend the class on the condition of doing the HWs and the quizzes. They teach the Sahidic dialect which is the dialect of the ancient manuscripts. It is a bit different form the Boharic dialect which the church books use. From pronunciation point of view it is slightly different from Bohiric and a bit different from the Greeco-Bohiric which is chanted in the church. It is very interesting though. Now I have a better idea how the words originally sounded. Because the Coptic is basically the ancient Egyptian language written in Greek letters, the people of upper and lower Egypt wrote their pronunciation of the words in different ways resulting in two writings for the same word.For example, the word "and" in Bohiric is written "ouoh" but is sahidic it its written "ouw" which tells you that the original sound of the word has a slight "h" in the end of the word. As a result, people from the north wrote "h" and people from the south didn't write "h". I'm so excited about this class :)

2 comments:

Lamma Helwa said...

u r lucky man to live in such a knowledge diversity!

keep it up

Ray Sweha said...

I got an A- in the class :)