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Teaching coptic language
Hi
It's been a while that I have posted in this forum, but I'll try to come back and be more active. Specially after I have seen this incredible effort of some people here who are posting coptic lessons :)
To all of you who know coptic: How did you learn the language, did you go to class, study it your self or have you been raised up with it? And I was wondering do you teach coptic language in your church aswell? And what curriculum are you using?
I have just started with teaching a small group and I'm wondering if I should do grammar and so on or just stop after they know the alphabet and the basics for reading?
God bless,
Marian
It's been a while that I have posted in this forum, but I'll try to come back and be more active. Specially after I have seen this incredible effort of some people here who are posting coptic lessons :)
To all of you who know coptic: How did you learn the language, did you go to class, study it your self or have you been raised up with it? And I was wondering do you teach coptic language in your church aswell? And what curriculum are you using?
I have just started with teaching a small group and I'm wondering if I should do grammar and so on or just stop after they know the alphabet and the basics for reading?
God bless,
Marian
Comments
To all of you who know coptic: How did you learn the language, did you go to class, study it your self or have you been raised up with it? And I was wondering do you teach coptic language in your church aswell? And what curriculum are you using?
You can get some online lessons - these are awesome:
http://www.suscopts.org/deacons/coptic/FT-Coptic Language-Lectures.pdf
Or, another very good resource is Sameh Younan's book, So You Want to Learn Coptic (if you google the title you'll get several links to online stores where it can be bought).
Unfortunately my Church doesn't teach Coptic, but I'm going to start lobbying that it does. BUT, I went to a Coptic School which taught (and teaches) Coptic from Kindergarten to Year 8 - the Curriculum was written by a local priest and its been pretty successful. If you're interested I'll give you the school's contact details and you can ask about getting a copy of their curriculum.
Hope that helps
I recently got hold of the Sameh Younan book that epchoic_nai_nan mentioned, and from the little I've read of it, it is superbly written and very instructive.
[quote author=minatasgeel link=topic=10771.msg131158#msg131158 date=1298145289]
Tasbeha.....that's have i learned coptic. 3 years of tasbeha every single saturday. that is of course after simply learning the letters and their pronunciations.
I too learnt to read Coptic and to understand quite a few words from attending tasbeha and learning hymns for several years when I was younger.
I go to a very small church, and we don't really have the people or time resource to have properly structured lessons or hymns convention etc. - in my free time when I'm home from university, I try to learn and pass on as much as I can to the younger generation. Thankfully there are quite a lot of good online resources for learning the Coptic language, so when the time comes, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement something.
I would certainly encourage learning the grammar! The more we know the language of our ancestors the better :D
Wow :o this is a great link: http://copticplace.com/coptic.html. Thank you very much, I didnt know about it. But I already have the book you mentioned before, its indeed great and easy to read. Epchois_nai_nai, i'm very interested in this coptic curriculum of your school, can you send me their contact detail please if possible.
[quote author=epchois_nai_nan link=topic=10771.msg131164#msg131164 date=1298158153]
Unfortunately my Church doesn't teach Coptic, but I'm going to start lobbying that it does.
You are amazing in teaching coptic in an easy way ;) so good luck with lobbying. JG, great to hear you give lessons in your free time, hope you can set up a real class soon.
[quote author=JG link=topic=10771.msg131166#msg131166 date=1298159529]
I would certainly encourage learning the grammar! The more we know the language of our ancestors the better :D
I totally agree, but one option is training a small group very intensively the language and its grammar and the other option is use that time for setting up a new group so more people get to learn the basics and the reading... what do you think?
www.speakcoptic.org
Learn to speak Coptic at
www.speakcoptic.org
Nice site! thnx :)
I was just listening to the first lesson on this website and I discovered that Fr. Shenouda Maher is pronouncing many words differently than me :o
For instance: I say: "Tamav" and he says: "damau" (my mother)
According to the site, the lessons are recorded in Coptic Bohairic.
So, which dialect am I using then? Or have I been doing it all wrong all that time? ???
Oujai
You are probably used to Greco-Bohairic which is a mix between greek and bohairic. Its supposedly a false way of pronunciation. The "true" pronunciation or most accurate is Old Bohairic which Abouna Shenouda is using.
I don't mean to highjack this topic but I have to ask a question. How do you (plural, not just jydeacon) know Old Bohairic is more true or more accurate than Greco Bohairic? I know there is a dubious history on how GB came about. But does that make GB any less true than OB?
Look at it this way. Is Jamaican English any more true or accurate than British English? To the British, the answer is probably "No". (Jamaican English is not more accurate than British English). To the Jamaican, the answer is probably yes or (Jamaican English is more accurate than British English (especially in Jamaica!!)). To the linguist, the answer is simple. Neither Jamaican English nor British English is any more accurate than the other. They are both linguistic varieties, used in specific social settings making both Jamaican English and British English sociolects or dialects of English.
The same should apply to Coptic. GB is a accent variety of Coptic as much as OB is. Both are sociolects of Coptic. One can only consider GB more accurate if that's all they have every known. But does that make GB more accurate than OB? The reverse is true too. One can only consider OB more accurate if that's all they know. And I agree that OB has science to show that it was the historical accent of Coptic in the 18th-20th century. But does that make it more true than GB?
Some have argued that GB should not be considered a legitimate accent/dialect of Coptic because it was brought on artificially. That comment, which is true, still shows bias toward OB's preference. I'm sure some people would consider "texting" English as an inferior dialect of American English. I hate it when someone responds to me "idk" or "b4". Of course, I think "texting" English should not be considered a dialect or have any resemblence of English. But it is an American English linguistic variety. It really doesn't matter how a dialect came into existence to be considered a dialectal variety.
Second point
How does anyone know that the OB pronunciation "which Abouna Shenouda is using" or anybody else is using is the accurate pronunciation of OB? How do we actually define OB? Is OB's definition "The pronunciation scheme used before the introduction of GB"? This seems to be the definition people are propogating. And this definiton has many problems with it. The Bohairic Coptic used and spoken in the 8th century is not the Bohairic Coptic spoken in the 9th or the 10th or the 18th centuries. Each locale and time period had it's own linguistic scheme. Which lingustic scheme defines OB? Inadvertantly, most proponents of OB seem to champion the late 19th/early 20th century OB and nothing else as the "true" Coptic. Is this the "accurate" OB accent/dialect? Or is it possible there are more than one "accurate" OB schemes? Or maybe the 8th century Bohairic Coptic accent scheme should be the definition of OB since it is probably the oldest?
I don't mean to single out any one person. Nor did I mean to single out British English. Sorry Fr. Peter. But we seem to make comments based on biases and preferences, not logic, reason and science. I guess I'm guilty of this too. So take it easy on me with the responses.
George
Thanks.
First, to the easier question about real "real" Coptic. As a general principle by which linguistics operates, we don't recognize such distinctions. It has been argued before, for instance, that Modern Hebrew is in some sense "illegitimate"; P. Wexler, for instance, advanced the idea that Modern Hebrew is a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past" (this was the title of his 1990 monograph). This is an incredibly weak thesis, as demonstrated by (among others) one of Israel's top linguists Olga Kapeliuk in her paper "Is modern Hebrew the only 'Indo-Europeanized' Semitic language? And what about Neo-Aramaic?" (in Izre'el and Raz [eds.] Studies in Modern Semitic Languages, 1996). In this paper, she makes the point that even if Wexler were right about the "European" character of Modern Hebrew, similar influences have been exerted upon undoubtedly Semitic languages. She gives the example of the standard Christian dialect of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic as spoken in and around Urmia, Iran. Because of its geographical placement and various social pressures, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic spoken there has taken on significant influences from Persian (an Indo-European language) and Kurdish (another Indo-European language).
The parallel between this situation and the Coptic situation is easy to draw, given the obvious influence of Greek on Coptic. The question then, to tie this into Remnkemi's question, is just what kinds of influences from Greek can be discerned, and when (or if) these influences be considered as "de-legitimizing" a given pronunciation of Coptic?
In short, while it is not possible to say that even the Greco-Bohairic (which I will go on record as saying I don't like, but that is a personal opinion, not a linguistic judgment) is "illegitimate" (at least not any more so than Modern Hebrew or Neo-Assyrian Aramaic are illegitimate), it is possible to say by various means that it does not reflect an organic evolution in the pronunciation of Coptic, such as we would see if Coptic were still an everyday spoken language (as opposed to liturgical only). I do not think it is some sinister conspiracy on the part of the teachers of the Greco-Bohairic dialect to ruin the purity of Coptic or anything like that. The shift, while having political and ecclesiastical ramifications, is at least understandable given the defective nature of the script itself. See, for example, Antonio Loprieno's excellent article "Egyptian and Coptic Phonology" from Alan S. Kaye (ed.) Phonologies of Asia and Africa vol. 1 (available in pdf form via this page), wherein an example is given showing the alternation of [p] and [v] in written Coptic coming from what was underlying "b" (i.e., the Egyptian root featured "b" but was realized in later Coptic words descended from it as either [p] or [v] -- so this is not, as is commonly asserted, an "Arabization" of Coptic!). The reasons for this alteration are complicated and I'm not confident that they'd do anything but cause you guys to tune out or become more confused. I recommend a close reading of Loprieno's article (as well as others on the "Coptic Sounds" website) for a better understanding of the intricacies of Coptic phonology.
You might, if an inherently imperfect analogy might help, consider how we determine that something is orthodox or unorthodox. It is my understanding that orthodoxy can be confidently determined by looking at what has been orthodox consensus since the time of the Apostles and Early Church Fathers. If some new doctrine or understanding comes about which is at variance with what our orthodox Fathers have declared, we can safely say "this new understanding X is unorthodox, and hence to be rejected". To some, not without reason, the Greco-Bohairic pronunciation is similarly not in line with the past and as such should be rejected. My linguist's oath (which is not a real thing, but should be) binds me to neutrality, so the best I can say is that the weight of the historical evidence is on the side of the Old Bohairic pronunciation, with the caveat that it is also a reconstruction.
I don't think getting hung up on notions of linguistic purity (something I like even less than G-B) should prevent anyone, Copt or otherwise, from learning the language. The pedagogical resources I have at my disposal are actually mostly for the Sahidic dialect, with a minority for the Bohairic, which teach the Greco-Bohairic pronunciation because that is the one "officially" used in the liturgy (i.e. Nabil Mattar's pedagogical grammar). The pronunciation differences between the Old and the G-B are predictable, so it doesn't take much to pencil in the OB forms if it really bothers you so much...or if you just want to have a command of both! (This is my position and one I have no trouble advocating for. ;))
For me personally, it does not matter to me what the pronunciation is as long as I understand what I'm speaking or chanting. I was not stating a fact but an opinion that those who follow OB hold. While, I do personally agree that OB seems more "authentic" if you will based on studies and simply how things flow a bit better than in GB which is choppy, In the end I don't consider one more legitimate than the other simply because we don't know.
It is like I urge some people to start pronouncing these words as such because they come from French: abandonment /abondemau:/... whatever...
oujai qen `P[C
oujai qen `P[C
[quote author=dzheremi link=topic=10771.msg133094#msg133094 date=1300233397]
First, to the easier question about real "real" Coptic. As a general principle by which linguistics operates, we don't recognize such distinctions.
So if we can't linguistically recognize what is "real" Coptic, then we can't argue GB is an illegitimate pronunciation. How is it possible to say GB does not reflect an organic evolution in the pronunciation of Coptic? What facts or reasoning support this argument? If we forget the dubious history of GB's introduction, and look at the linguistic pronunciation variation from OB, is it much different than any other set of dialects evolving "naturally" (say Akhmimic Coptic vs. Sahidic Coptic or Koine Greek vs. Attic Greek)? As far as I know, the linguistic variation of Akhmimic Coptic from Sahidic Coptic is just as distant as GB to OB. The question at hand is how do we define an organic evolution of pronunciation. It can not be based on what we prefer Bohairic pronunciation to be or what we believe organic evolution is. You're right the analogy is imperfect. But the imperfection is big enough to make it the analogy uncomparable. In Orthodoxy, Christ gives the Church a divine commission to correct and remove heresies. But no one is given linguistic authority to rule a variance as un-Coptic or illegitimate. But we don't know what the linguistic past of Bohairic pronunciation is. No one addressed the second point in my previous message. How do we know what the line is? There is no manuscript or literary evidence. There is no audio evidence. There is no study describing any Bohairic pronunciation before the 19th century Old Bohairic scheme. We only have 2 defined points on this "line": 1. Current pronunciation of Bohairic in the Church. 2. GB introduction in 1865. Yet we know the line of Bohairic Coptic starts in the 8th century. So how can we reject something that does not fall on the line we can't define. That's a big caveat. It reinforces the idea that we really don't know how Bohairic Coptic was pronounced. What we define as Old Bohairic is only a reconstruction of the 19th century scheme. We have very little historical evidence of Old Bohairic before the 19th century. OB proponents reject GB solely on the basis of linguistic purity. And as far as I can tell from everything I'm reading on linguistic variations, the basis of linguistic purity is based on prejudices, not science. I agree with you. Having a command of both is ideal. But when other languages contacted, a balanced bilingual environment was rarely found, where compentancy in both languages was achieved. Usually, one langauge takes supremecy over the other in a specific pattern or location (and usually language supremecy alternates between the different languages when used in different places, like Arabic or English at home and Coptic in Church).
All I wanted to show was that GB has a right to be considered Coptic as much as OB. And for what it's worth, I also prefer OB over GB.
George
Very well said dzheremi. Strong comments, and proofs. My main point against (not really against, but understanding where they come from) Remenkimi and Fr. Peter is that they are unable to read Arabic, and in the studies you mentioned there are many quotes with Arabic text, to compare the pronunciation rules with such, and some of those are as old as 1850's, and 1860's, roundabout the same time the movement of Mr. Erian Moftah came about - apparently without so much faith from Coptologists around that time...
oujai qen `P[C
Ophadecee what does my incompetency of Arabic have to do with Greco Bohairic's linguistic characteristics? If I was perfectly fluent in Arabic, would GB be any more legitimate for you? I agree, GB came about with much problems. But linguistically, GB shares as many characteristics as OB does.
I am not sure how an artificial language could be called a language. We have manuscripts that show the person who changed Bohairic to its current form. So, how can we say that the current form of Coptic used in the Church is authentic. We know what it used to be before mutilating it from the vast manuscripts we have. So, if I know the real language, why would I learn the fake one.?
Thanks.
Linguistically defined, a language is media of communication. If 2 people can communicate consistently, then they have a language. There is no requirement for age. Now there are groups (like Ethnologue) who discuss indigenous and new languages to see how they should be characterized (as a new language or a dialect of another language). But no one has the authority to declare a language fake. It may be your own personal opinion, but GB's authenticity is not based on personal opinion. And like I said before, manuscript evidence direct us only to a 19th century pronunciation scheme, not an "authentic" pronunciation scheme.
You're probably not paying attention to what I'm saying. The link dzheremi kindly provide it has a plethora of studies, some of them in 1850 - 1860, and with the aid of audio recordings at the time. I'd encourage you to have a go at reading some if not all of the older ones, hoping that you'll understand Arabic enough for the purpose of comparisons...
Oujai
And are you also able to communicate (having conversations) in OB?
Oujai
Yes marian6, to some extent...
Oujai
ophadece, can you tell me more? :)
And from which church are you if I may ask? Does the whole chorus pray like this?
Depends on what you want to know, so I can tell you more. I usually pray in st. George and st. Athanasius church in Newcastle. Unfortunately there is none other than me who uses old Bohairic. Pray for us a lot please...
Oujai
Dear marian6,
Depends on what you want to know, so I can tell you more. I usually pray in st. George and st. Athanasius church in Newcastle. Unfortunately there is none other than me who uses old Bohairic. Pray for us a lot please...
Oujai
i doubt any churches pray with it. I know abouna Shenouda Maher prays in OB all the time. hehe, Abouna in my church does every long once in a while--ya3ny small things like "newen", ari-pamawe.....small things.
Thanks
Old Bohairic is scientifically proven to be the authentic pronunciation. I would say 80% of the Church's prayers and alhan have been recorded in OB. Listening to them makes it clear that GB is fake.
despite all the "evidence", it still doesn't click in my mind.
Oujai