t "vulgar" forms, having moved more slowly than the speech of the
people. Christian Coptic, though probably at first contemporary with
some documents of Old Coptic, contrasts strongly with the latter. The
monks whose task it was to perfect the adaptation of the alphabet to the
dialects of Egypt and translate the Scriptures out of the Greek, flung
away all pagan traditions. It is clear that the basis which they chose
for the new literature was the simplest language of daily life in the
monasteries, charged as it was with expressions taken from Greek,
pre-eminently the language of patristic Christianity. There is evidence
that the amount of stress on syllables, and the consequent length of
vowels, varied greatly in spoken Coptic, and that the variation gave
much trouble to the scribes; the early Christian writers must have taken
as a model for each dialect the deliberate speech of grave elders or
preachers, and so secured a uniform system of accentuation. The remains
of Old Coptic, though very instructive in their marked peculiarities,
are as yet too few for definite classification. The main divisions of
Christian Coptic as recognized and named at present are: Sahidic
(formerly called Theban), spoken in the upper Thebais; Akhmimic, in the
neighbourhood of Akhmim, but driven out by Sahidic about the 5th
century; Fayumic, in the Fayum (formerly named wrongly "Bashmuric," from
a province of the Delta); Bohairic, the dialect of the "coast district"
(formerly named "Memphite"), spoken in the north-western Delta. Coptic,
much alloyed with Arabic, was spoken in Upper Egypt as late as the 15th
century, but it has long been a dead language.[13] Sahidic and Bohairic
are the most important dialects, each of these having left abundant
remains; the former spread over the whole of Upper Egypt, and the latter
since the 14th century has been the language of the sacred books of
Christianity throughout the country, owing to the hierarchical
importance of Alexandria and the influence of the ancient monasteries
established in the north-western desert.

The above stages of the Egyptian language are not defined with absolute
clearness. Progress is seen from dynasty to dynasty or from century to
century. New Egyptian shades off almost imperceptibly into demotic, and
it may be hoped that gaps which now exist in the development will be
filled by further discovery.

Coptic is the only stage of the language in which the spelling gives a
clear idea