Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tonio Sebastian Richter
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: since 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213098685

Coptic was an eminent 'language in contact,' mainly borrowing from two donor languages, Greek and Arabic. Greek was spoken and heard in Egypt as early as in the 7th century BCE, a millennium before the standardization of Coptic. In the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek spread over the Eastern Mediterranean and became the most important lingua franca in the Middle East. In Egypt Greek was used alongside the native Egyptian language from the 4th century BCE up to the 8th century CE. For over 1000 years, Greek functioned both as the spoken language of a courtly, administrative, and urban élite, and as a written language. It gradually dominated administration, economy, literature, sciences, and even private day-to-day correspondence The massive Greek impact on the contemporary Egyptian idiom becomes obvious in thousands of Greek loanwords in Coptic, representing almost all parts of speech and semantic fields. So it is no exaggeration to say that the Greek-Egyptian contact is one of the most broadly attested cases of language contact in antiquity.The DDGLC project seeks to produce a systematic, comprehensive and detailed lexicographical compilation and description of Greek loanwords as attested in the Coptic corpus throughout all dialects and genres of text. The results of the project shall be made available in an online database and in a printed dictionary. The core tool of the DDGLC project is a relational database designed to connect linguistic and extra-linguistic data concerning types and tokens of all identifiable loanwords in Coptic. The DDGLC project will eventually document and present 1,500 years of contact-induced language change of the Egyptian-Coptic language to linguists, philologists and historians for further study.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants