“Yes, undoubtedly. What else should it be?”
The idle man hereupon suggested that it seemed to him, from what he had just seen of the church books, as if it might be a corrupt form of Byzantine Greek.
The bishop shook his head.
“The Coptic is a distinct language,” he said. “Eight Greek letters were added to the Coptic alphabet upon the introduction of Christianity into Egypt; and since that time many Greek words have been imported into the Coptic vocabulary; but the main body of the tongue is Coptic, purely; and it has no radical affinity whatever with the Greek.”[247]
This was the longest speech we heard him make, and he delivered it with some emphasis.
I then asked him if the Coptic was in all respects a dead language; to which he replied that many Coptic words, such as the names of the months and of certain festivals, were still in daily use. This, however, was not quite what I meant; so I put the question in another form, and asked if he thought any fragments of the tongue yet survived among the peasantry.
He pondered a moment before replying.
“That,” he said, “is a question to which it is difficult to give a precise answer, but I think you might yet find in some of the remoter villages an old man, here and there, who would understand it a little.”
I thought this a very interesting reply to a very interesting question.
After sitting about half an hour we rose and took leave. The bishop shook hands with us all round, and, but that we protested against it, would have accompanied us to the head of the stairs.