The Greek-speaking Church : the liturgy (end)
Maintaining Greek as the default language of the liturgy obviously made the position of the faithful increasingly uncomfortable. The gap between liturgical usage and their true linguistic mastery grew ever wider, reaching a breaking point in the 8thcentury . While this gap was neutralized orally by the force of habit and the ability of the faithful to mimetically reproduce the sound of words learned by heart, and sometimes by recourse to translations - as well as by the presence of interpreters attested to for Egypt by Serapion of Thmouis (4thcentury ) - the same could not be said of the written word. The result was a proliferation of hymnbooks and other liturgical collections so riddled with errors as to make Greek unrecognizable.
The crushing weight of the past : the institutional marginalization of Egyptian
However, it is the historical situation of Egyptian during the Ptolemaic period and, above all, under Roman domination, that largely explains the long delay in the emergence of Coptic as an autonomous language, freeing it from the tutelage of Greek. Indeed, when it appeared in the 3rdcentury , after a period of interruption during which Egyptian had no longer been used naturally in writing, Coptic not only had to find its place in a written culture now totally occupied by Greek, but also had to conquer an official status, a task made all the more difficult by the fact that the centuries of collective "agraphy" into which the Egyptians had been plunged marked a halt in the legal-administrative tradition, - the hypothesis of a continuity from Demotic to Coptic in this domain being unproven.
Coptic a victim of its origins
Over and above the obstacles inherent in the language and the weight of history, it is undoubtedly in the strong links that Coptic has had with Hellenism since its origins, and in the profound Hellenization of its inventors and the first generations of its users, that we must ultimately seek the reason for the inhibition that has kept it out of the public sphere for so long, and distracted its users from the desire to impose it as a possible competitor to Greek in the fields of regulated writing. This question plunges us into the heart of the sociology of Coptic and the problem of the conditions of its emergence, which interested us last year.
