Tag: Coptic

He’s getting all Coptic on me

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Isn’t it funny how different various groups of scholars are?  Some are all free and easy and helpful.  Others are all suspicious, riven with rivalries.  The first lot respond to enthusiastic but ignorant emails kindly.  The second ignore them.  The first band together to get things working.  The second sit in their various bastions and snipe at each other and the outside world. 

Doing an edition of material which exists in Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Coptic throws an interesting light on the various ways these languages are handled online.  Everyone knows about the Hugoye list for Syriac studies, started by George Kiraz who also made Syriac unicode fonts of all kinds freely available.  He even got the Estrangelo Edessa font included by Microsoft into Windows!  Syriacists are all helpful, and Syriac studies online is frankly booming.  At Brigham Young University Kristian Heal is putting online a  massive collection of Syriac texts.  George has reprinted loads of them, which gets them into libraries.  In short, every contribution adds to the whole.

Christian Arabic is much the same, not least because late Syriac writers also wrote Christian Arabic, and a lot of the same people are involved on a lower level.  The NASCAS google group is where they hang out.

My experience of Coptic and Coptologists, on the other hand, belongs to the other side of the spectrum.  There’s the Copts themselves, who are a good bunch.  But some of the academics … phew!  One sign of this is that only one decent Coptic unicode font exists, Keft; and this was done at huge expense with government grants and is still not finished.  No free Bohairic font exists.  Indeed people are still messing around with non-unicode Coptic fonts.  Likewise I don’t know of an online forum like Hugoye or Nascas for Coptic.  And always, always, I get this impression of people looking down their noses.

But at least some people are fighting back.  Dr Hany S. Takla of the St. Shenouda Center for Coptic Studies in Los Angeles is doing what he can.  There’s a Facebook group, which he invited me to yesterday.  This in turn tells me about resources that I wouldn’t otherwise know of.  There’s the journal Coptica, for instance.

Mind you; Hugoye is also a journal, not just a forum.  And the journal exists in free online form, as well as in printed form.  How George Kiraz makes that work I do not know.  But Coptica is only offline, sadly.  I hope Dr. Takla will find a way to make this online.

But I recommend the facebook group.  Dr Takla (who also looks in on Nascas) is plainly doing a huge work, and doing it more or less by himself.  Well done, that man!

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Someone who knows about Coptic writes…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I had an email from Christian Askeland, who tried (and failed) to comment on the Coptic posts, but kindly emailed me anyway.  Spam is such a nuisance; you get rubbish you don’t want, and lose stuff you do.  But the email was so useful that I post it here.

1) Your editor is technically incorrect to label Keft as “Sahidic”.  Most people would agree with your editor against me on this.  The reality, however, is that Sahidic was written in three different scripts:  Biblical majuscule, Alexandrian majuscule and Sloping pointed majuscule.  The last was generally used in non-literary documents.  Because most of our Bohairic manuscripts date from the 11th-19th centuries, most of them appear in a script developed from the Alexandrian majuscule, and this is considered a Bohairic script.  The fact is that early Nitrian Bohairic manuscripts appear in biblical majuscules.  Even earlier papyrus manuscripts such as the early Bohairic of John and the Minor Prophets use an informal version of the Biblical majuscule.

Having said all this, feel free to use a font which represents your manuscript’s time and style.  If I were to restart my project, I might use Alphabetum to distinguish my Medieval Bohairic texts.

The major issue is this: how anal are you with your transcription?  Keft is a superior font, having been designed by the IACS for about 10,000 Euro under the auspices of Stephen Emmel.   Primarily, Keft excels in being able to handle combining superlinear strokes in Sahidic.  Perhaps, this is not an issue in Bohairic.

2)  The diagonal lines over Bohairic characters are “djinkim.”  The are functionally the same as the dots, although the dots were used in earlier manuscripts.  In the late fourteenth century, a more expansive system of these dots developed, allowing a rough kind of dating based on these superlinear marks.  There is no translational significance to these marks.  Some marked vowels, some were reading aids.

Are you using this keyboard?  It is free, and is designed for Microsoft Word.

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More on the Alphabetum font

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email this morning from Juan-Jose Marcos, the developer of the Alphabetum font.  It seems that he keeps the font under development, for the email announces an upgrade.  Unicode 5.2 includes a couple more obscure Coptic characters, and since I registered the font, he’s sending me the upgrade.

He also points me to an improved Charmap utility, named Babelmap.  It’s freeware.  I haven’t tried it, but Charmap is quite underpowered.

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Have asked Hercules to consider doing a swap

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve asked Hercules if he’d consider allowed me to clean the Augean stables, in return for cleaning up the word document containing the Coptic fragments of Eusebius Quaestiones.  At least, I would have done but I don’t have his mobile number.  And anyway, I think the big lunk would refuse. 

The file contains any number of points at which the translator has indicated two possible meanings rather than one.  This leaves me as the editor to decide which best fits the context.  But I shall choose the more English-like, and place the other in a footnote unless it is simply an identical idea in a different word.

Another problem is where the text changes from translation to commentary or general remarks, all placed inline and not distinctly marked off.  This ought to have been in footnotes, I think.

But I have now processed the translators pencilled comments into the file, and am reworking it now.  I think the translation — which is what it is all about in the end — really is good, and sound.  All the rest is less important.

The translator also went over the transcription, which I had not expected, but which was good.  In truth the transcriber made some mistakes.  But he didn’t do a bad job (aside from omitting one entire line, by the process known to all manuscript buffs), and probably there are only four or five typos.

Onwards…

UPDATE:17:41.  A very hard day’s work, but the Coptic is now in the same form as the rest of the book.  I’m awaiting the Syriac transcription, but otherwise the heavy lifting is all done.

The next stage is cross-referencing the Syriac, Coptic and Arabic fragments with the Greek.  I’m fairly tempted to use Lulu and print off a copy of the whole thing in a spiral binding, with nice wide margins, so I can scribble on it.  We’ll see.   I also need to go through and remove the TODO marks in various places.

One issue I have not resolved is whether to use the translation of the introduction to Lagarde’s catena.  Lagarde wrote in Latin, but I had it run into English for the Coptic group.  It’s quite interesting; but out of date, of course.  That reminds me; some kind friends sent me some PDF’s of material relating to it, which I need to read.

But I’ve done enough for today.    I might bunk off and go and play Microsoft Freelancer instead this evening!

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Notes on unicode editing in Coptic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here’s a couple of notes on how I’m editing unicode Coptic in Microsoft Word 2007.

I’m using Wazu Japan’s Comprehensive Unicode Test Page for Coptic a lot.  This allows me to identify characters and unicode character sets.

I find I can enter any character in word by just typing the four-character code, and hitting Alt-X.  So if I type 0307 after a Coptic character and hit Alt-X, I get a diacritical dot above the character.  Wazu’s page tells me what the codes are!  What I have actually done is to record a macro, so I move to the character and hit Alt-1, which runs a macro that types 0307 and hits alt-X.  It saves keystrokes.

OK; I’ve manually replaced unicode accents (code 0300) with dots on a couple of fragments, and I’m getting fed up.  Can I do a global replace?  I think so.  This microsoft page (I had to use the Google cache version, as Microsoft tried to divert me to some useless registration process) seems to tell you.  You can search for any unicode character using this:

 ^Unnnn where nnnn is the character code

Let’s try it: ^U0300 in the Find box… and it doesn’t work.  ^U is not allowed.  I try ^u, lower case, and that is allowed but finds nothing.  Rats.  It seems I am not the first to discover this.  Not merely must it be lower-case; it must be decimal, not the hexadecimal (base-16) codes supplied by charmap or the Wazu page. 

OK, let’s try.  A hex converter is here.  Hex 0300 is decimal 0768, it seems.  Let’s try ^u0768.  And … nope.  That doesn’t work either.

 Boy this wastes a lot of time!  Thanks Microsoft.

UPDATE: Persistence pays off.  Well, I have a workaround.  You cannot replace unicode combining characters like dots and accents.  But … you can replace the character and the dot together.  I have just copied an e+accent into Find What (it looks like garbage when it arrives – but no matter) and copied an e+dot into Replace, and it worked.  It replaced 462 instances, indeed.  So… I can do a lot of these that way.

Still annoyed that Word doesn’t deal with it properly, tho.

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Sympathy for Hercules

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An Augean day today.  I’ve received an A4 envelope containing a print-off of the translation of the 18 Coptic fragments of Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions (Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum) with pencil revisions in the margin, plus revisions of the Coptic transcription, plus notes on the translation of De Lagarde’s Latin preface.  Also an electronic file containing a new version of the translation.  All this has to be merged together, which would anyway be arduous and is hampered by a somewhat disorganised presentation.

De Lagarde benefited from the generosity of the then owner of the Coptic manuscript.  The latter was rather more generous than the British Library of our own day with its talk of copyrights on PDFs which has prevented me seeing it.

Now, since Robert Curzon, with that mindset whereby the British nobles are ever ready to help in every fine endeavour, had promised on 1 May 1866 (after I wrote to him from Schleusingen) to grant me free access to the very valuable books he had collected, in the year 1874 I asked Robert, Lord Zouche, the son of that most magnanimous man, who had meanwhile been summoned to heaven, to honour his father’s promise (I was intending to edit the Egyptian Psalter). 

He very kindly, with truly unheard-of benevolence, entrusted to my piety and learning both the most ancient fragments of the Egyptian Psalms and the codex of which I have just been speaking, sending them to Göttingen. 

This favour was all the more gratifying, the more certain it was that neither in my own Germany were such treasures possessed—for I was born after the riches of the globe had been distributed—nor in the whole of Europe was there to be found, apart from myself, a man who had both studied theology and had acquired some acquaintance with the Egyptian language, and was willing to expend toilsome and thankless effort—and to suffer a large enough financial loss—on the task of editing this catena.

Faced with such generosity, one might hope that De Lagarde would behave similarly.  Alas, at the end of the preface we read:

All those who wish to do so may use my volume, but only with the proviso that without my permission it is not permitted to reproduce what I have edited, nor to include it in the margin of an edition of either the Egyptian New Testament or of the Fathers.

I thank Robert, Lord Zouche, to the highest extent of my abilities for sending the manuscript to me in Göttingen to use.

De Lagarde’s failure to provide a translation was a more certain guarantee that his work would remain unused than this early claim of copyright.  It was successful; the catena remains unknown and unused by scholars.

Let us mourn the passing of the aristocratic spirit, in these days of small minded officialdom, and honour the shade of Robert, Lord Zouche.

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More on Coptic unicode fonts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A few minutes ago I wrote about Alphabetum, the commercial Coptic font which uses the Bohairic typeface, and the way in which this limited people working with Coptic.  This led me to think about the idea of commissioning a free font. Of course really this is something that a grant body should make happen. 

A hunt around the web revealed that Keft, the free Coptic unicode font with the Sahidic typeface, was designed by Michael Everson of evertype.com.  It seems that it was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies, whose website is rather out of date and does not say so.  I wonder what it cost?  It seems that Stephen Emmell was responsible, and it sounds like a long and arduous process was involved!

Both these fonts support unicode 5.1 which matters for things like dots over letters (diacritics).  Few of the other free fonts do.

I do wonder a bit about Coptic studies.  Syriac studies is pretty free-wheeling, everyone is friendly, everyone wants to encourage people, and everyone just pitches in.  In Coptic studies there seems to be a lot of stuffiness, a lot of “I’m far too important to reply” and general crustiness.  I got that feeling again reading the stuff about Keft.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never paid any attention to Coptic.

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More on the Alphabetum font

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My copy of the alphabetum font has arrived.  Unfortunately the email that supplied it added some extra conditions on use, not disclosed at time of purchase.  I bought the license that allows use in books, you see, for the Eusebius project.

First he wants purchasers who use it in a book to acknowledge the use of the font.  That’s just advertising, of course, and doesn’t really matter.

Much more serious is that he also wants a free copy of any book using the font.  Drat the man.  That’s an extra charge to use it for the purpose for which I bought it, and for which he advertised it.  In fact that must be illegal, I would have thought.  I’ve written to tell him so politely.  After all, I doubt he wants to annoy people. 

What all this brings home, tho, is how fortunate Syriac users are in having the Meltho unicode fonts.  Meltho are absolutely free, and indeed one of them even comes with Windows.  We all owe George Kiraz such a debt of gratitude for this.

By contrast Coptic users are crippled by lack of availability of a family of good quality unicode fonts, and are obliged to scurry around for whatever happens to exist.  Many of the fonts don’t handle dots and overscores very well — although Alphabetum does handle them exactly. 

A further problem is that you can’t pass around a Word document with material in Alphabetum; the recipient won’t be able to read it, unless they have a copy of the font.  You find yourself tangled up in a mess of problems that obstruct and hamper, for tiny amounts of money.

If I knew Coptic, I might fix all this by commissioning a font designer to make one.  But since I don’t know the alphabet, it’s out of the question.

I’m generally impressed with Alphabetum.  If you need a Bohairic Coptic font in Unicode, it will do the job.

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Alphabetum – a more “Bohairic” coptic font? Plus notes on Coptic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had complaints from my translator that the Keft unicode font for Coptic isn’t that “Bohairic” in appearance.  Well, I could pass a Bohairic book in the street and not recognise one!  But I do recognise a difference in letter forms between Keft and what is used by De Lagarde in his 19th century printed text.

Quite by accident I have come across the Alphabetum font.  It’s not free, but not expensive.  Here’s a bitmap comparing the fonts; top one is De Lagarde; the middle one is Alphabetum; bottom one is Keft. 

Three Coptic Fonts; De Lagarde, Alphabetum and Keft

 The Keft font is apparently a “Sahidic” Coptic font.  The New Athena Unicode font is of the same type.

There’s some stuff on entering Coptic unicode here.  It looks as if I’m going to need to do it.  And I have just found these links by Christian Askeland, which look good.  These led me here, to some more fonts, of which only Arial Coptic seemed like De Lagarde, and the diacriticals didn’t seem right.  And this in turn gave this test page.

One difference I can see between De Lagarde and Alphabetum is the diacriticals.  It’s not that easy to find out about these, I find.  I wonder if the difference is important?

I need to find a basic grammar that is good on these things.

UPDATE: I have also found a wikipedia test page for Coptic in unicode 5.1, which lists a number of fonts as well-supported although is still vague on typefaces.  Quivira is listed, and is a VERY nice font; but Sahidic again.  Analecta is another new one to me.

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Eusebius update 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I emailed someone this morning about transcribing the text of the Coptic fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel problems and solutions.  Rather to my surprise he did the first fragment then and there into unicode, and perfectly well.  I’m so used to delays on the Coptic that it is delightful to find someone getting on with it.

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