Arabization and language change in Egypt : the impact of Coptic as a substrate language
(2015) Language change in the Arab World — Location: University of Amsterdam (15.December.2015)
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- This paper will focus on the Arabization process in Egypt, which occurred from the 7th century onwards. More specifically, it will focus on the linguistic change from Coptic to Arabic from the vantage point of the impact that Coptic had on Arabic. To this purpose, a variety of written sources, both literary and documentary, will be browsed. First, after a brief introduction about the Arab conquest, we will focus on the early arabization, i.e. the period when Coptic remained the main language but was already showing somes trace of Arabic influence. We will track Arabic words and names occurring in Coptic (and Greek) documents. Moreover, on the basis of an evaluation of the available papyrological data for this period, we will try to estimate how deep the Arabization process was in matters pertaining to everyday life (administrative documents, letters, etc.). Also, we will investigate some (rare) Arabic texts written in the Coptic alphabet. In a second time, we will focus on the translation process of major Coptic litterary works into Arabic, which gives us a lot of information about arabization in the Coptic ecclesiastical milieus. Focusing mainly on the Coptic-Arabic historiographical corpus (mainly the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria (HP), partly translated from Coptic in the 11th century), we will take into consideration many instances of the impact of Coptic on Arabic texts ("Copticisms") that are found, for instance, in some peculiar syntactical features. Finally, after such translated texts, we will provide some occurrences of remaining traces of Coptic in texts directly written into Arabic, consequently showing the impact of Coptic as a substrate language in Egypt. For the sake of optimal accuracy, we will mainly use literary sources from the abovementioned historiographical corpus (HP) in its "afterlife", i.e. its continuations and rewriting phases. These results will be compared with data found in a few contemporary Arabic documents.
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Pilette, P. (2015). Arabization and language change in Egypt : the impact of Coptic as a substrate language. Language change in the Arab World, University of Amsterdam. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/80953