Α Detailed Study about Egyptian-Coptic and Software Engineering

The ancient Egyptian is one of the world’s oldest attested languages, with the hieroglyphic script demonstrating its existence since the 33rd century BC. Its final stage, the Coptic language, began in the 1st century AD, with Old Coptic, and extends until the 16th century AD, creating a continuous of written sources in Egyptian language of almost 5000 years. The transliteration of Egyptian-Coptic starts with the alphabetization of written Egyptian on the basis of the Greek script and it is one of the greatest proofs of the cultural interaction between the two cultures. Coptic was the language of the monks and the gospels, the scriptures, the letters and other transactions, leaving us a written wealth. Another proof of the unsurpassed cultural relationship between the two populations is the large number of Coptic texts and objects on display or at archives in Greek museums and libraries. It is also noteworthy that Coptic survives today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. However, the lack of interactive computational tools in Greek makes it difficult for Greek scholars to study the language in depth and allows various misinterpretations. In this present work we try to present Coptic material that exists in Greece, the huge volume and the undisputable value of the Coptic language in the diachronic history of languages, but also the incapacity of digital resources to meet the needs of researchers and scholars of Coptic in Greece. This will highlight the need to create a software tool that will fill in the gaps and the weaknesses of other tools, a software application that will make it easier for the user to study and learn Coptic, and finally an application that will help to preserve this language over the centuries. This software tool will be based on a pre-existing model of ancient languages processing, which was successfully implemented in the case of Linear B, aiming at both educational and research use for any kind of Coptic artefact.