1. The Coptic language
Pallas’ Comparative Dictionaries of All Languages and Dialects (Sravnitel’nye slovari vsex jazykov i narečij) contains 324 words in Coptic. One wonders whence Pallas got his data for this language, that was not widely studied in his time. In this article I try to identify his sources and hope to find some insights into the way Pallas’ Dictionary was made.
Coptic was used in Egypt between the years 200 and 1100 Christian era and is the direct descendant of the Egyptian language from the time of the Pharaohs. From the 8th century onwards, it was gradually replaced by Arabic but is still used in the liturgy of the Coptic church. There exists a considerable literature in Coptic, which comprises translations of the Bible, saints’ lives, sermons and texts connected with Egyptian monasticism. In the last century, important Coptic texts of Gnostic inspiration have also come to light.
Coptic is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family which also includes Berber, Semitic, Cushitic and other language groups. It has come down to us in several written varieties, of which Sahidic and Bohairic are the most important. Sahidic originated in the Southern Nile Valley and was the literary norm in the early period. Bohairic, from the Western Delta, eventually became the language of the Coptic Church.
Coptic is written in the Greek alphabet, but with six extra letters derived from the Egyptian Demotic script. The language is characterized by a great quantity of Greek loanwords: ⲡⲟⲗⲓⲥ (polis) is ‘city’, ⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲟⲥ (aggelos) is ‘angel’.
2. Copts and Coptic in the West
The Egyptian Church played an important role in the history of the early Christianity. It was the cradle of monasticism (Saint Anthony, 251-356) and Alexandria was – besides Antioch and Byzantium – one of the great centres of theology, with authors like Clement (c. 150 – c. 215) and Origen (c. 185 – c. 253). But after the controversies over the humanity and divinity of Christ at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Egyptian Church and the other ‘Oriental Orthodox Churches’, as they came to be known much later, split off from Rome and Byzantium. The Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century isolated the country further from the West.
Western interest in the Eastern Churches reemerged when the schism between Rome and Byzantium of 1054 seemed to be overcome at the Council of Florence (1438-1445). Pope and emperor signed the bull Laetentur caeli in 1439 and this paved the way for further reunion efforts with Eastern Churches. Pope Eugenius IV (1383-1447) invited the Coptic patriarch John XI (1428 – 1453) to the council and the Coptic delegation caused a stir in more than one Italian city. The oldest layer of Coptic manuscripts in the Vatican Library dates from this time.
The reconciliation of Laetentur caeli didn’t last long, and new initiatives for unity were impossible after the fall of Constantinopel in 1453. After the Reformation interest in the Copts became an instrument in the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism. Both factions wanted to prove that the Oriental Orthodox Churches were in fact on their side. Protestants pointed out that there had always been churches rejecting papal primacy, and Catholics looked for arguments in Coptic liturgy and theology for the antiquity of Roman practices and beliefs.
In 1555, patriarch Gabriel VII (1525 – 1568) wrote a letter to pope Paul IV (1476-1559) that seemed to hint at a union with Rome. Paul’s successor Pius IV (1499-1565) entrusted the Jesuits Cristóforo Rodríguez and Giovanni Battista Eliano with a mission to Egypt in 1561. The description of their travels in Alistair Hamilton’s The Copts and the West 1439-1822, which is the main source for the historical parts of this article, makes excellent reading: storm and pirates, endless misunderstandings due to a lack of knowledge of Arabic, a disastrous visit to a Coptic monastery, topped with Eliano’s arrest and escape from the Ottoman authorities. Reports of the ‘untrustworthy’ Copts found their way in literature and determined the Western image of the Copts for a long time.
It took a long time before Europeans gained some real knowledge of the Coptic language. An important step towards its understanding was due to the traveller Pietro Della Valle (1586 – 1652), who was in Egypt in 1615 and 1616 and brought back some Arabic texts on Coptic grammar and Coptic-Arabic vocabularies. These became part of the Vatican Library in 1718. The Leiden orientalist Claude Saumaise (1588 – 1653) was one of the first European scholars who tried his hand at Coptic. The task to edit the manuscripts of Della Valle was first handed to the very competent Tommaso Obicini (1585-1632), but he died before much work had been done. The work was then entrusted to Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). This extraordinary polymath and polyglot later famously and falsely claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs and introduced the idea that Coptic and Chinese are related languages. His knowledge of Arabic was limited, and he worked slapdashly, so his Egyptological studies contain many mistakes. And he did not shrink from making up Coptic words in order to prove his theory about the meaning of the mysterious name (Zaphnath-Paaneah) that Pharaoh gives to Joseph in Genesis 41:45. Yet his Prodromus Coptus sive Aegypticus (1636) contains the first printed Coptic grammar.
The Coptic grammar by Guillaume Bonjour (1670 – 1714), completed in 1698, was an enormous improvement on Kircher. Bonjour was an Augustine monk from Toulouse, who came to Rome in 1695 to study in the Vatican library. His academic way of life took an adventurous turn when he went to China for missionary purposes. He arrived in Macao in 1710 but died four years later. Bonjour’s Elementa linguae Copticae was consulted in manuscript by later generations of Coptologists who visited Rome, and only in 2005, three centuries after it was finished, it appeared in print.
A similar fate befell the Coptic dictionary of Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze (1661-1739). His life too was anything but boring. As a child he was not very happy at school, and he went to the Antilles at the age of 14, where he learned to speak English, Spanish and Portuguese and where he perfected his Latin with Erasmus’ Colloquia and the Gradus ad Parnassum. Back in France he entered the Benedictine order in 1677, where he was attached to the scholarly Congrégation de Saint Maur. He left the congregation in 1696, escaped to Basel by stagecoach and converted to Calvinism. In 1697 he became librarian in the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin (now Berlin State Library). Besides his Lexicon Aegyptiaco-Latinum (1721) Veyssière de la Croze compiled dictionaries for Armenian, Syriac and Slavonic, none of which was ever printed. His biographer Charles-Étienne Jordan (1700-1745) came in possession of these manuscripts and after his death the Coptic and Armenian dictionaries were bought by Leiden University, where they are still kept.
In 1750 a Polish theology student in Leiden, Karl Gottfried Woide (1725-1790), made copies of the Coptic dictionary for himself and for his teacher, Christian Scholtz (1697-1777). Woide became preacher at the Dutch Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace in London in 1770. Scholtz and Woide published a Coptic dictionary based on Veyssière’s work. They kept all the words in Veyssière’s manuscript but shortened the references and moved the Sahidic words that Veyssière had collected at the end of each letter, to an appendix at the end of their book. The following illustrations of the lemmas for ⲥⲁϫⲓ ‘sermo’ and ⲟⲩⲁⲓ ‘unus’ in Veyssière’s manuscript and the printed Lexicon give an indication of the differences between the two sources:
Illustration 1: lemma for Bohairic ⲥⲁϫⲓ ‘sermo’ in Veyssière (1721) p. 353
Illustration 2: lemma ⲥαϫι ‘sermo’ in Scholtz/Wojde p. 89
Illustration 3: lemma ⲟⲩⲁⲓ ‘unus’ in Veyssière (1721) p. 259
Illustration 4: lemma ⲟⲩⲁⲓ ‘unus’ in Scholtz/Wojde p. 66
The dictionary of Scholtz and Woide was published at the Clarendon Press in 1775. This book seems to be the source of the Coptic entries in Pallas’ Dictionary as will be argued below. In 1778 Scholtz and Woide published a Coptic grammar (Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti) and I argue that this publication too has been on Pallas’ desk.
3. Coptic in Pallas
With the generous help of Jacques van der Vliet, professor emeritus of Egyptology and Coptology at Radboud University and Mariette Keuken, subject librarian Egyptology at the Leiden University Libraries, it was possible to link almost all of the 324 Coptic words in Pallas to entries in the Coptic Dictionary of Walter Ewing Crum (1865-1944), the standard modern dictionary for the non-Greek Coptic lexicon. Only seven words are not yet accounted for:
| lemma | transliteration | meaning |
| альи́о̀тъ | alʹíòtʺ | утка (Ente/duck/anas) |
| ӷудаи | g̀udai | какъ (wie?/how?/quomodo) |
| махунубъ | mahunubʺ | кадъ (Kübel/tub/cadus) |
| одъ | od” | что (was/what/quid) |
| халшови | halšovi | дѣва (Mädchen, Jungfrau/girl/virgo) |
| яӷаяӷа | ɑg̀a | брови (Augenbrauen/eyebrows/supercilia) |
| яя | ɑɑ | лѣпо (angenehm/pleasant/pulchre, lepide) |
Van Vliet suggests that mahunub” might be connected with Greek μηχανή ‘machine’ that appears in Bohairic as ⲙⲁⲭⲁⲛⲏ/machanē, meaning ‘irrigation device’ or ‘bucket’; and thathalšovi could be a problematic rendering of ϧⲉⲗϣⲁⲓⲣⲓ/khelšairi ‘little, young servant’. But this last word is already represented more regularly in Pallas as халшири/halširi with the meaning ‘young’.
That Scholtz and Woide’s Lexicon was the source of Pallas, is not too bold a suggestion. It fits well with most of the items in Pallas and there were no alternatives available: the works of Kirchner and Thomas Edwards Rudimenta linguae Coptaesive Aegyptiacae of 1711 are clearly insufficiently rich as sources, and Bonjour’s grammar and Veyssière’s lexicon were not in print. Some details also seem to point to Scholtz and Woide:
(a) Pallas gives two forms for the words ‘hole’. This corresponds with the double appearance of these words in Scholtz/Woide:
уоданъ/uodanʺ and уатни/uatni ‘дыра/Loch/hole/foramen’. The first form reflects Scholtz/Woide ⲟⲩⲱⲧⲉⲛ/ouōten (p. 72), and the second ⲟⲩⲁⲑⲛⲓ/ouathni (p. 66). Crum cites ⲟⲩⲱⲧⲛ/ouōtn as the Sahidic form and ⲟⲩⲱⲧⲉⲛ /ouōten as Bohairic. (b) Some words in Pallas include the prefixed definite or indefinite article in the lemma. In six out of eight cases, these prefixed forms in Pallas can be found in the corresponding lemmas in the Lexicon. For example:
- ниводи/nivodi ‘grass’ = ⲟⲩⲟϯ/ouoti ‘greens, herbs’ with n-/ni- definite plural article.
- ӷаньíо̀вви/g̀anʹÍòvvi ‘leaves’ = ϭⲱⲃⲉ/kjôbe ‘leaf’, with han- the indefinite plural article.
- нироми/niromi ‘people’ = ⲣⲱⲙⲓ/rômi ‘man’, with n-/ni- definite plural article.
(c) The Lexicon Aegyptiaco-Latinum doesn’t contain the Greek loanwords in Coptic, except three items that De Veyssière judged to be Coptic loanwords in Greek (vox origine Ægyptiaca). Two of these are also represented in Pallas (ааръ/aar” ‘air’, Greek: ἀήρ/aēr and аула̀/aulà ‘court’, Greek: αὐλή/aulē), but not ϩⲓⲛⲁ/hina, Greek: ἵνα/hina ‘so that’. This omission might be explained by the fact that this conjunction is not part of the basic stock of 297 lexemes of the Pallas dictionary; it doesn’t figure in the words listed in Pallas’ Modèle du vocabulaire qui doit servir à la comparaison de toutes les langues from 1785. But this argument isn’t decisive, as neither ‘court’ is amongst the 443 words of the Modèle. Pallas contains eight other Greek loanwords that must come from another source. One of these words can be found in the Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti:алакдоръ/alakdorʺ ‘rooster’ (Greek ἀλέκτωρ/alektōr), but the provenance of the other seven words is unclear:
| lemma | transliteration | Greek | Transliteration | meaning |
| абиксунъ | abiksunʺ | ἐπίγεια | Epigeia | ground-floor |
| акдинъ | akdinʺ | ἀκτίς | Aktis | ray, beam |
| валаносъ | valanos | βάλανος | Balanos | acorn |
| дарашакъ | darašakʺ | ταραχή | Tarakhê | disorder |
| кадосъ | kadosʺ | κῆτος | Kêtos | any sea-monster, huge fish |
| срувалосъ | sruvalosʺ | στρόβιλος | Strobilos | cyclone, whirlwind |
| шїонъ | šïonʺ | χιών | Chiôn | snow |
(d) for ‘God’ Scholtz/Wojde gives ⲛⲟⲩϯ/nouti, but with the remark that it is pronounced as abnudi (‘quam vocem hodierni Aegyptii pronunciant ABNUDI’). Pallas chooses for abnudi, the spoken form as given by Scholtz/Wojde. Coptic always adds the article before ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ/noute if it doesn’t refer to a heathen deity, and abnudi reflects ⲛⲟⲩϯ/nouti with the article: ⲫⲛⲟⲩϯ/phnouti. Arab speakers add a prothetic vowel before an initial cluster like phn-
4. Pallas’ working method
What can be learned from a comparison between Pallas’ source materials and the Coptic words in the Comparative Dictionaries about the methods that were used in compiling the book? A few points seem to be clear:
- (a) Transcription, not transliteration
Pallas generally tries to render the sounds of the words and doesn’t aim for a simple transliteration of the orthography of the source language. A quick glance in the French material makes this clear:
- beau бо bo ‘good’
- joyeux жойe̋ žojö ‘happy’
For a lesser-known language as Coptic Pallas wanted the same, as is already clear from the abnudi example above. That the Coptic forms in Pallas are no mechanical substitution of the Greek letters in Scholtz/Wojde is obvious. Two features leap to the eye:
- The Coptic letters ε/η (e/ē) are regularly transcribed as a:
- S/W: ϧⲣⲉ/khre ‘food’ Pallas: хра/hra
- S/W: ⲏⲣⲡ/ērp ‘wine’ Pallas: арбъ/arbʺ
- S/W: ⲛⲏϫⲓ/veči ‘belly’ Pallas: наїи/naïi
This surprising transcription is in line with what is said about Coptic pronunciation in the Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti from Scholtz and Wojde that appeared three years after the Coptic dictionary and must have been known to Pallas as well.
Illustration 5: Coptic ⲉ/e rendered as a (‘pronuntiatio hodierna’) on p. 1 of the Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti.
- The letters t/p/ti rendered as d/b/di
- S/W: ⲓⲱⲧ/iōt ‘father’ Pallas: iо̂дъ/ɨôdʺ
- S/W: ⲙⲡⲁ/mpa ‘voordat’ Pallas: амба/amba
- S/W: ⲛⲓϣⲧⲓ/ništi ‘great’ Pallas: нишди/nišdi
The transcription of τ/t, π/p and ϯ/ti as d, b and di is, again, in line with what Scholtz and Wojde state about the pronunciation of Coptic letters in the first chapter of their Grammatica:
Illustration 6: Coptic ⲡ/p rendered b and ⲧ/t rendered d on p. 2 of the Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti.
- (b) Mistranslations through Russian
Some Coptic words receive a surprising translation that can only be explained via peculiarities of the Russian target language:
(1) The word ϫⲓⲛⲓⲣⲓ/činiri ‘carob, ceratonia siliqua’ is translated by Pallas as ‘rye’, although Scholtz/Wojde renders it correctly with ‘κεράτια/kerátia, siliquae’. The word is used in the Bible in Luke 15:16, where the Prodigal Son has become pig herd and wants, in the words of the New International Version, to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating. In the Russian translation of Luke, the word рожок is used in this place, and that word is a derivation from the word рожь ‘rye’.
(2) Coptic βακι/baki ‘city, town’ is rendered by Pallas as ‘hail’. This is due to the homonymy of the Russian words градъ ‘hail’ and градъ ‘city’.
(3) ⲙⲟⲕⲓ/moki ‘jar, vessel’ (Scholtz/Wojde ‘vas’) has become судно/sudno (‘ship’) in the Comparative Dictionary of All Languages and Dialects. Here the reason for the transfer must be located in the word посуда/posuda ‘crockery, plates and dishes’, that in a colloquial style also means ‘vessel’.
(4) Crum translates Coptic ⲧⲟⲟⲩⲓ/tooui as a substantive, ‘dawn, morning’, Scholtz/Wojde as an adverb or a substantive: ‘mane’, ‘tempus matutinum’. Pallas has ‘light’ (свѣтъ/světʺ). The change in meaning can be explained by Russian forms with the same root, like светать/svetat’ ‘to dawn’ and светеат/svetaet ‘the day breaks’.
(c) Coptic numerals in Pallas
Some of the Coptic numerals show unexpected transcriptions in Pallas:
| Scholtz/Wojde | Pallas | Crum | ||||
| four | ϥⲧⲟ, ϥⲧⲉ | fto, fte | фдо́у | fdóu | ϥⲧⲟⲟⲩ | ftoou |
| six | ⲥⲟⲟⲩ | soou | iо̂у | ɨôu | ⲥⲟⲟⲩ | soou |
| nine | ψⲓⲧ, f. ψⲓϯ | psit, f. psiti | исидъ | isidʺ | ψⲓⲥ, ψⲓⲧ | psis, psit |
The -óu ‘four’ is not in line with Scholtz/Wojde, but surprisingly concurs with the modern dictionary of Crum; the initial s- in ‘six’ is strangely rendered by ɨ-, which in initial position is Pallas’ usual transcription of ϫ-/č-.
In ‘nine’ we have the initial cluster ps- rendered as is-. This is unregular, but it might be explained as the insertion of a prothetic vowel before an initial cluster (as we saw earlier with abnudi ‘God’), but a concomitant (and mistaken) drop of the first consonant of the cluster. The Grammatica utriusque dialecti prescribes a prothetic i- for the pronunciation of some of the syllabic consonants of Coptic (ф/ph, ϥ/f) and uses it in the transcription of Psalm 1 on page 3 for other syllabic consonants as well, including the cluster ps-: ⲡⲥⲟϭⲛⲓ : ibsóschni. The same thing (i-insertion and drop of first consonant) seemed to have happened with the word ⲥⲃⲉ/sve ‘door’ that is rendered in Pallas as ива/iva.
It is known that Pallas used a special source for the numerals of many of the languages in his dictionary, namely Lorenzo Hervás’ Aritmetica delle nazioni e divisione del tempo fra l’orientali, 1786 [oral communication of Nicoline van der Sijs, 20.10.2023]. And indeed, on page 159 of this work, we find numerals from the Lingua Egiziana o Copta, in Sahidic and Bohairic. But this is not the answer to our riddle; Hervás declares that his source is the dictionary of Scholtz/Wojde, and his forms do not show any of the peculiarities of Pallas: ‘four’ is fti, fte, fto; ‘six’ is sooë; ‘eight’ is scmoëm, scmïn and ‘nine’ is psit. However, the Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti can shed some light: in chapter 9 (pp. 33-36) the following forms are given for the Bohairic dialect:
- 4: ϥⲧⲟⲟⲩ/ftoou (m); ϥⲧⲟ/fto, ϥⲧⲟⲉ/ftoe (f)
- 6: ⲥⲟⲟⲩ/soou (m); ⲥⲟ/so (f)
- 9: ψⲓⲧ/psit (m), ψⲓⲧϯ/psitti (f)
This explains Pallas’ transcription for ‘four’. Keep in mind that the rendition of η/ē as a is regular in Pallas.
5. Bibliography
Aufrère, Sydney, and Bosson, Nathalie. “Le Père Guillaume Bonjour (1670-1714) Un orientaliste méconnu porté sur l’étude du copte et le déchiffrement de l’égyptien.” Orientalia (Roma), vol. 67, no. 4, 1998, pp. 497–506.
Bonjour, Guillaume, et al. Elementa linguæ copticæ : grammaire inédite du XVIIe siècle. Cramer, 2005.
Crum, Walter Ewing. A Coptic Dictionary. At the Clarendon Press, 1939.
Hamilton, Alastair. The Copts and the West, 1439-1822 : The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Hervás, Lorenzo. Aritmetica delle nazioni e divisione del tempo fra l’orientali. Per Gregorio Biasini all’Insegna di Pallade, 1786.
Janssen, Jozef. ‘Over het Koptisch woordenboek van Veyssiére la Croze’ Orientalia Neerlandica : A Volume of Oriental Studies 1948 pp. 71-74.
Jordan, Charles Étienne. Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Mr. La Croze, avec des Remarques de cet auteur sur divers sujets, 1741.
La Croze, Maturin Veyssière de. Lexicon Aegyptiaco-Latinum ex veteribus illius linguæ monumentis summo studio collectum et elaboratum. Leiden University Libraries Special Collection, Or. 431 B., 1721.
La Croze, Maturin Veyssière de. Lexicon ægyptiaco-latinum ex veteribus illius linguæ monumentis summo studio collectum et elaboratum a Maturino Veyssiere la Croze. Quod in compendium redegit, … Christianus Scholtz: … Notulas quasdam, et indices adjecit Carolus Godofredus Woide. e Typographeo Clarendoniano, 1775.
Pallas, Peter Simon Modèle du vocabulaire qui doit servir à la comparaison de toutes les langues [Publisher not identified], 1785.
Pallas, Peter Simon Sravnitel’nye slovari vsex jazykov i narečij, sobrannye desnicej Vsevysočajšej osoby imperatricy Ekateriny II Sankt-Petersburg, 1787–1789.
Pallas, Peter Simon Sravnitel’nyj slovar’ vsex jazykov i narečij, po azbučnomu porjadku raspoložennyj Sankt-Petersburg, 1790-1791.
The Digital Pallas https://pallas.ivdnt.org [date accessed: 12.09.2025]
Scholtz, Christian, and Charles Godfrey Woide. Christiani Scholtz … Grammatica Ægyptiaca utriusque dialecti quam breviavit, illustravit, edidit, Carolus Godofredus Woide S.A.S. Clarendon, 1778.