) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for ( я, е, ю ); Coptic has a letter for.

Athanasius is venerated as a Christian saint, whose feast day is 2 May in Western Christianity, 15 May in the Coptic Orthodox Church, and 18 January in the other Eastern Orthodox Churches.

The earlier date, 293, is sometimes assigned and apparently supported by the authority of a " Coptic Fragment " ( published by Dr. O. von Lemm among the Mémoires de l ' académie impériale des sciences de S. Péterbourg, 1888 ) and corroborated by the maturity revealed in his two earliest treatises Contra Gentes ( Against the Heathens ) and De Incarnatione ( On the Incarnation ), which were admittedly written about the year 318 before Arianism had begun to make itself felt, as those writings do not show an awareness of Arianism.

However, in Coptic literature, St Athanasius is the first patriarch of Alexandria to use Coptic as well as Greek in his writings.

The relic of St Athanasius the Great of Alexandria is currently preserved under the new Saint Mark Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Deir El-Anba Rowais, Abbassiya, Cairo, Egypt.

In Coptic literature, St. Athanasius is the first patriarch of Alexandria to use Coptic as well as Greek in his writings.

He is celebrated in many churches on his feast days: 30 January in the Old-Calendar Eastern Orthodox Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church ; 17 January in the New-Calendar Eastern Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Coptic Catholic Church.

The Books of the Bible are listed differently in the canons of Judaism and the Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Slavonic Orthodox, Coptic, Georgian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac, Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches, although there is substantial overlap.

In the Coptic Orthodox Church chapter three is chanted on the twelfth hour of the Good Friday service, that commemorates the burial of Jesus.

It is also situated at the nucleus of Coptic Orthodox community, which separated from the Roman and Byzantine church in the late 4th century.

This miaphysite position, historically characterised by Chalcedonian followers as " monophysitism " though this is denied by the dissenters, formed the basis for the distinction from other churches of the Coptic Church of Egypt and Ethiopia and the " Jacobite " churches of Syria and Armenia ( see Oriental Orthodoxy ).

He is also known for his involvement in the expulsion of Novatians and Jews from Alexandria and the murder of the Hellenistic philosopher Hypatia by Coptic monks.

The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria is the official name for the largest Christian church in Egypt and the Middle East.

Christianity spread throughout Egypt within half a century of Saint Mark's arrival in Alexandria, as is clear from the New Testament writings found in Bahnasa, in Middle Egypt, which date around the year AD 200, and a fragment of the Gospel of John, written in Coptic, which was found in Upper Egypt and can be dated to the first half of the 2nd century.

A term that comes closer to Coptic Orthodoxy is miaphysite, which refers to a conjoined nature for Christ, both human and divine, united indivisibly in the Incarnate Logos.

The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria believes that Christ is perfect in His divinity, and He is perfect in His humanity, but His divinity and His humanity were united in one nature called " the nature of the incarnate word ", which was reiterated by Saint Cyril of Alexandria.

The number of Coptic Orthodox Christians in the diaspora is roughly 4 million.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church do acknowledge the Honorary Supremacy of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, since the Church of Alexandria is technically their Mother Church.

It is known as the Coptic calendar or the Alexandrian Calendar.

The Coptic Orthodox Church is thus considered an Old Calendrist Church.

Traditionally, the Coptic language was used in church services, and the scriptures were written in the Coptic alphabet.

File: Coptic Bible. JPG | Prayer book, known as Book of Psalmodies, written in both Coptic and Arabic

The contents of the Coptic-bound codices were written in Coptic, though the works were probably all translations from Greek.

The use of Greek in liturgy eventually gave way to the Nubian language, which was written using an indigenous alphabet that combined elements of the old Meroitic and Coptic scripts.

Coptic and Demotic Egyptian are grammatically closely akin to Late Egyptian, which was written in the Hieroglyphic script.

Coptic belongs to the Later Egyptian phase which started to be written in the New Kingdom.

The Egyptian language, now written in the Coptic alphabet, flourished in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

The oldest Coptic writings date to the pre-Christian era ( Old Coptic ), though Coptic literature consists mostly of texts written by prominent saints of the Coptic Church such as Anthony the Great, Pachomius and Shenouda the Archimandrite.

What invariably attracts the attention of the reader of a Coptic text, especially if it is written in the Sa ' idic dialect, is the very liberal use which is made of Greek loan words, of which so few, indeed, are to be found in the Ancient Egyptian language.

During the first two centuries of the Common Era, an entire series of magical texts were written in what scholars term Old Coptic, Egyptian language texts written in the Greek alphabet.

The Old Nubian alphabet — used to write Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language — is written mainly in an uncial Greek alphabet, which borrows Coptic and Meroitic letters of Demotic origin into its inventory.

Some Egyptian syllables had sonorants but no vowels ; in Sahidic, these were written in Coptic with a line above the entire syllable.

His name is reconstructed by Egyptologists as *, as it was written and survived in later Coptic as Aphōph.

In 1945, Hermetic writings were among those found near Nag Hammadi, in the form of one of the conversations between Hermes and Asclepius from the Corpus Hermeticum, and a text about the Hermetic mystery schools, On the Ogdoad and Ennead, written in the Coptic language, the last form in which the Egyptian language was written.

The Coptic alphabet has a long history, going back to the Hellenistic period, of using the Greek alphabet to transcribe Demotic texts, with the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of Demotic.

This is the reason why Old-Calendrists ( using the Julian and Coptic calendars ) presently celebrate Christmas on 7 January, 13 days after the New-Calendrists ( using the Gregorian calendar ), who celebrate Christmas on 25 December.

In 2007 he was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies to create a standard free Unicode 5. 1 font for Coptic, Antinoou, using the Sahidic style.

The Coptic language, which used to be written with written using the Greek alphabet, was spoken in Egypt before the Arabic Islamic conquest.

In different places in the Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene is called Jesus's companion, partner or consort, using Coptic variants of the word koinônos ( κοινωνός ), of Greek origin, or the word hôtre, of Egyptian origin.

The language is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a religious nature, written using a modified form of the Coptic script ; the best known is The Martyrdom of Saint Menas.

The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script, and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, and many other writing systems.

It is frequently proposed that the letters sha Ⱎ, tsi Ⱌ, and cherv Ⱍ were taken from the letters shin ש and tsadi צ of the Hebrew alphabet, and that Ⰶ zhivete derives from Coptic janja Ϫ.

Johan David Åkerblad's table of Demotic phonetic characters and their Coptic alphabet | Coptic equivalents ( 1802 )

* Coptic alphabet, the script used for writing the Coptic language.

The new writing system became the Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six or seven signs from the demotic script to represent Egyptian sounds the Greek language did not have.

Coptic therefore is a reference both to the most recent stage of Egyptian after Demotic, and to the new writing system that was adapted from the Greek alphabet.

: Main article Coptic alphabet

Coptic uses a writing system almost wholly derived from the Greek alphabet, with the addition of a number of letters that have their origins in Demotic Egyptian.

Some of the letters in the Coptic alphabet that are of Greek origin were normally reserved only for words that are themselves Greek.

The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language.