The inhibiting weight of Greek and the long process of autonomy : the parallel of literature
The handicap of multidialectalism was amplified by the overriding position of Greek, the language of administration since the 4thcentury B.C. and, above all, a language that had been able to adapt to Roman law since the Roman conquest and even more so since the Antoninian Constitution (212). This supremacy of Greek was not without inhibiting the development of Coptic, which, having only recently been formed, had not yet been able to complete the long process of adaptation and autonomization necessary to become a language capable of fulfilling legal-administrative functions.
This necessarily lengthy process is not confined to legal-administrative writing : traces of it can also be found in the field of literature. The three-century gap between the first attempts to use documentary Coptic and the first Coptic legal documents coincides precisely with the interval observed in the field of literature (of which we still have only a very embryonic knowledge), between the first witnesses to literary Coptic and the large-scale development of an original Coptic literature - with the notable but singular exception of Shenuté, superior of the White Convent, who died in 465.
The oldest Coptic literary papyri contain only translations of biblical texts and Greek patristic and homiletic works. The first traces of the use of Coptic for compositional purposes, rather than translation or reproduction, are to be found in monastic circles, but examples predating Shenuté are rare and, very often, problematic and dubious. It seems that in the 4thcentury , Coptic-language culture did not express itself in a written form designed to transcend everyday writing. It wasn't until Shenuté that Coptic became a literary language completely independent of Greek, but it wasn't until the episcopate of Damian (578-605) that Coptic-language literary production really began to flourish, not as the work of an exceptional personality but as part of a general movement. It has been pointed out that the quantity of works goes hand in hand with their quality. Tito Orlandi, underlining the qualitative leap that this movement represents in the history of the Coptic language, did not hesitate to speak of " natural progress in the language and [of] its growing independence from Greek ". The same was true of documentary writing : it took time for Egyptians to think of their language not simply as a medium of private communication, but as an " institution " crystallizing a certain number of collectively shared values and capable of having as much authority and prestige in all fields as Greek.
