Delivery:

The course comprises a 2-hour lecture and a 1-hour tutorial each week. The tutorial will provide the opportunity to consolidate the information presented in the lecture and will comprise working through exercises from the text book (see 'required reading below') as a group.

Lectures and tutorials will be recorded and uploaded to Echo360 soon after class. Course notes will be uploaded to iLearn, as will the 3 assessments. The weekly class test will also be available on iLearn for external students.

PC and Internet access are required. Basic computer skills (e.g., internet browsing) and skills in word processing are also a requirement.

Note: iLearn should be regularly consulted for updates, learning tools, and for participation in the discussion forum.

Required Reading

Lambdin, T. O., Introduction to Sahidic Coptic, Macon 1983 (2^nd edition 1992).

RECOMMENDED READING

Layton, B., Coptic in 20 Lessons. Introduction to Sahidic Coptic with Exercises and Vocabularies. Leuven 2007.

Other Sahidic grammars

As scholarly focus since the late 19^th century has primarily been on Sahidic, there is a large body of teaching aids available for this dialect. The following list is not exhaustive, but lists the most important grammars.

Layton, B., A Coptic Grammar. Wiesbaden 2000 (2^nd ed. Wiesbaden 2004).

Mallon, A., Grammaire copte: bibliographie, chrestomathie et vocabulaire, 4 éd. revue par Michel Malinine, Beyrouth 1956.

Plisch, U.-K., Einführung in die koptische Sprache (sahidischer Dialekt). Wiesbaden 1999.

Polotsky, H. J., Études de syntaxe copte, Cairo 1944.

Reintges, C., Coptic Egyptian (Sahidic Dialect). A Learner's Grammar. Köln 2004.

Shisha-Halevy, A., Coptic Grammatical Categories. Structural Studies in the Syntax of Shenoutean Sahidic. Roma, 1986.

Stern, L., Koptische Grammatik, Leipzig 1880.

Till, W., Koptische Grammatik, Leipzig ²1961.

Till, W., Koptische Dialektgrammatik, München ²1961.

Torallas Tovar, S., Gramática de Copto Sahidico. Madrid 2001.

Dictionaries

At this point of learning Coptic it is not necessary to purchase one of the dictionaries listed below, although access to a dictionary will be necessary for the advanced study of Coptic. For the purposes of this unit, the dictionary given in Thomas Lambdin, Introduction to Sahidic Coptic, is quite sufficient. The most important dictionary below is Crum, W.E. Coptic Dictionary.

Černý, J., Coptic Etymological Dictionary, Cambridge 1976.

Crum, W. E., Coptic Dictionary, Oxford 1939 (various reprints since, including Oxford 1999 and Wipf & Stock Publishers 2005).

Kasser, R., Compléments au Dictionnaire copte de Crum. Cairo 1964.

Smith, R., A Concise Coptic-English Lexicon, Grand Rapids 1983.

Westendorf, W., Koptisches Handwörterbuch, Heidelberg 1965-77.

Coptic fonts

For the purposes of this course it is essential that you learn to type words in Coptic (or Greek). Most ancient language fonts – even if they are of the same language – have a different distribution of characters on the keyboard. So if members of the group use different fonts, this will lead to misunderstandings. The conveners suggest therefore that you download the public domain Coptic and Greek fonts “SPAchmim” and “SPIonic” and the Coptic and Greek Unicode font “New Athena Unicode”.

SPAchmim and SPIonic

They are available for both PC and Macintosh computers on the following website:

http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/fonts/

Please take also note of the copyright notice on the website indicated. The fonts are available for a wide range of use, even for publication, however, commercial use is not permitted.

They are accompanied by a .readme file which explains the keyboard distribution of the letters and diacritics (accents, punctuation marks). They are not professional fonts and do not give all the diacritics.

Alternatively, one can download the fonts from the website of the Society for Biblical Literature:

http://www.sbl-site.org/Resources/Resources_BiblicalFonts.aspx

New Athena Unicode

This is available for both PC and Macintosh computers on the following website:

http://apagreekkeys.org/NAUdownload.html

For Coptic Unicode input (that is, keyboard layout), follow the directions provided at:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/coptic.html

Changes

The learning outcomes have been modified since the last offering of the unit.

Successful Compeletion

To complete the unit satisfactorily you will need to submit all assessment tasks and achieve an overall mark worth 50% or above.

Course Structure

Each week, there will be a 2-hour lecture (Monday) and a 1-hour tutorial (Friday). The course material will be presented in the lecture and the tutorial will consist of exercises, undertaken as a group, that will reinforce the information learned in the lecture. Attendance at both the lecture and tutorial is compulsory. Note: under 'Tutorial', 'Lessons' refers to  the chapters in T.O. Lambdin, Introduction to Sahidic Coptic.

Week 1

- General introduction / Technical matters

- History of the Egyptian language

- Coptic alphabet

- Overview of standard grammatical terms

- Learning goals

Tutorial: more on the alphabet and grammar review.

Week 2

- Nouns: number and gender

- Articles: "the" definite article

- Prepositions: overview 

- The Adverbial Sentence: "the woman is in the house"

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 1 and 2

Week 3

- Articles continued: more on "the" and introduction of "a"

- Adverbial sentences with indefinite nouns: "a woman is in the house"

- Relative claues: "which" will be our first steps in the relative

- Genitive: the house "of" the man

- Greek nouns in Coptic

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 2 and 3

Week 4

- The Possesive Article: "my" house

- The Demonstrative Article: "this" house

- The Nominal Sentence: "He is a carpenter"

- The Demonstrative Pronoun: "this thing/this one"

Class test 1.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 4 and 5

Week 5

- The Independent Personal Pronoun: "I am", "You are"

- The Nominal sentence continued: "I am a carpenter"

- Coptic Question Words: "What" is an interrogative pronoun?

- The First Perfect and the Tripartite Conjugation Pattern: "He heard"

Class test 2.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 6 and 7

Week 6

- Prepositions: simple and compound, with adverbs, and before nouns

- Suffix pronouns

Class test 3.

Assignment 1 due.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 8 and 9

Week 7

- Direct Objects: "He kicked the ball"

- Word order in sentences with multiple objects

- States of the verb: absolute, pre-nominal and pre-pronominal

- Negative First Perfect: "He did not hear"

- Prepositions (continued)

Class test 4.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 10 and 11

Week 8

- Relative Clauses: of the First Perfect - "which he heard"

- Substantivised Relative Clauses: "he who heard" "that which he heard"

- The so-called Cleft Sentence: "It was my father who gave it to me"

- Clause conjugations: The Temporal - "when he heard me"

- More on states of the verb (pre-nominal and pre-pronominal)

- Miscellaneous: passive voice; introducing direct quotaitons; expressing purpose with the infinitive

Class test 5.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 12 and 13.

Week 9

- The Second Tense: the Second Perfect "It is because of his sins that he died"

- The Second Tense in questions: "Why did your father die?"

- More infinitives

- Attributive relations between nouns: "a wise man"

- Numbers

Class test 6.

Assignment 2 due.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 14 and 15.

Week 10

- More on question words: "How many interrogatives are there?"

- Quantifiers: "each, every, all"

- Indefinite pronouns: "Someone - anyone - no one"

- More numbers

- The Imperative: "Learn the imperative!"

- The Vocative: "O Lord!"

Class test 7.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 16 and 17.

Week 11

- The Bipartite Conjugation Pattern: The First Present, the First Future, pronominal prefixes

- The Stern-Jerstedt rule

- Relative forms of the First Present and First Future

- More infinitives

- Greek verbs

Class test 8.

Tutorial: exercises from Lessons 18 and 19.

Week 12

- The Inflected Infinitive: "in order that he hears"

- Introducing speech

- More infinitives

Class test 9.

Assignment 3 due.

Tutorial: exercises from Lesson 20.

Week 13

NB: No Lecture (public holiday 9/6/14). Some of the content below will be disucssed in the tutorial, in which class test 10 will also be taken.

- The Coptic system of converters

- The Imperfect (Preterit Tense): "I was sitting on the beach"

- The Qualitative

- Creating adverbs: Prepositional phrases using preposition + indefinite article + noun

Class test 10.

Tutorial: exercises from Lesson 21.