The system of Coptic vowel reduction: evidence from L2 Greek usage

• Sonja Dahlgren ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Helsinki

     University of Helsinki

     Helsinki, Finlandia

     
• Localización: Italian journal of linguistics, ISSN 1120-2726, Vol. 32, Nº. 1, 2020
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this paper I study Coptic vowel reduction through L2 Greek misspell-ings in Egypt from the Roman period onwards. Greek was the language of the government with mostly Egyptian scribes. In many cases, it is obvious that the nonstandard vowel replacements in Greek result from the Coptic tendency to reduce the quality of unstressed vowels to schwa. L2 Greek misspellings offer a glimpse into the system of vowel reduction in Coptic, evidence of which is not easily obtained language-internally. The misspellings are congruent with pho-neme distribution in Coptic and can be verified by similar misspellings of Greek loanwords in native Coptic texts. Observed phenomena are the reduction of unstressed word-final vowels to schwa, stress-conditioned allophonic variation in round vowels, and consonant-to-vowel coarticulation word-medially