Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Plumley's Coptic Grammar

Thanks to Paterson Brown for the note that the on-line edition of Plumley's Coptic Grammar has been revised. The major update is that a downloadable MS Word version is now available in addition to the original mimeograph version and the complete hypertext version, which has itself undergone revisions in presentation. Here is the main link:

J. Martin Plumley's Introductory Coptic Grammar

I must admit that I have not used this introductory grammar much myself, preferring the Lambdin introduction. But Lambdin is not that easy to get hold of and it is a little expensive, so this service over at Metalogos is a superb one, all the more so in the light of April DeConick's recent call for compulsory Coptic for all:
No one who studies early Christianity should be allowed to graduate with a Ph.D. without having learned Coptic. There are too many early Christian documents in Coptic for it to be considered just an "additional" language any more.
Update (Wednesday, 7.49): Judy Redman has comments, with links, in a post on Update on Plumley’s Coptic Grammar and other Coptic resources.
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1 comment:

  1. Eric Rowe27 March 2007 at 20:19

    By DeConick's reasoning, Latin, Syriac, Greek, and Coptic all need to be compulsory. I am in a program that requires Hebrew for NT doctorates, and I can't see justification for not doing so. This would be a minimum of 5 ancient languages plus the modern ones. Students who want to write dissertations in topics within early Christianity requiring Ethiopic, Aramaic, Georgian, Armenian, or something else would have to add it in as a 6th somehow. By the time a student learns these languages there won't be time left to read the material.

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