Hi, sorry for the weird question but how is Coptic the original Egyptian language when it uses the Roman alphabet? I was also wondering doesn't that technically mean it's not an Egyptian language since it was taught through the roman invasions?
Okay so that’s a good question. It all started in the 3rd century BC when Egyptian priests started using Greek letters to write down medical spells for other Greeks since they could not read Egyptian correctly due to the non-existence of vowels in pre-coptic writing systems.
This Coptic (Greek) writing system started spreading more among Egyptians who converted to christianity due to the hellenization and Christianization processes in the country. Plus they started using it more than older Egyptian writing systems (hieroglyphs, demotic, etc..) since those writing systems have pre-christian pagan origins, but Koine greek was the language of the New Testament so it all adds up to why Egyptians started using Coptic instead of older systems of writing.
Now the question is, does that mean that coptic is Greek? The short answer is no. Otherwise, we’d consider English a Roman language, or Russian a Greek one considering that its Cyrillic alphabet was also heavily influenced by Greek. Of course the same goes with other languages like Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu, Vietnamese, Farsi and Urdu, etc.. in which they collectively borrowed their letters from other languages.
This is such a huge topic but I tried giving you the important points briefly so you would understand how things ago, so thanks for asking ❤️