I want to brainstorm my readers: Did the Copts’ consideration of their language as sacred contribute to its demise? I don’t know the answer but I simply entertain the notion. We know that the Copts regarded their language as sacred. The Apocalypse of Samuel attributed to St. Samuel of Kalamoun from the seventh century talks about the Coptic language through which the Holy Spirit spoke to us. In this regard, Coptic, or rather its writing, was put in a similar footing with the Hieroglyphic of our ancient descendants – a language of divinity and for divine purposes. This is possibly why our literature is fundamentally religious, and no major secular work has been found to have been written in it. Prior to the Arab Conquest in 640 AD, the Copts wrote secular literature but in Greek; after the Conquest, and when they mastered Arabic in the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods (969 – 1250), they wrote in Arabic, this time, as they abandoning Coptic, producing both secular and religious works in the language of the Hijra. Mark Sheridan has recently published a paper, The Mystery of Bohairic, suggesting that the Copts used Greek earlier and then Arabic because these were the languages of learning. I beg to differ: I think the Copts could have used Coptic to write in any genre, in secular or religious subjects. I think the theory that they probably abstained from writing secular literature in Coptic because they regarded as a sacred language that ought to be used only in religious text.
The Copts were not unique in taking that view of their language. The Arabs after Islam took their language as sacred: the text of the Koran was said to have been inscribed in Arabic on a tablet and kept with Allah from the Creation. The Jews also thought of their Hebrew as sacred: Yahweh spoke it with the Prophets, and the Old Testament was written in it. We know that when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was working in Palestine trying to revive Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries he was met with staunch resistance from Orthodox Jews who thought that Hebrew was a sacred language and should not be used in ordinary life. Their efforts of course did not succeed, but their is no doubt they tried to frustrate his efforts.
