Carolyn Morris, age 15, of Austin, Texas, for her question:

WHAT IS THE COPTIC LANGUAGE?

Coptic is the extinct language of Egypt that developed from ancient Egyptian. The language is preserved, however, as the liturgical language of the Coptic church. The Coptic church is the native Christian church of Egypt.

Coptic began to succeed demotic Egyptian (the literary Egyptian of the period between 700 B.C. and A.D. 400) by about the 2nd century A.D. By the 3rd century, Christian literature began to appear in Coptic.

During that era Greek was the language of intellectual circles in Egypt and so the Greek alphabet was adopted for Coptic. It is thus the only part of the Egyptian language written in a way that makes the pronunciation clear to modern scholars.

Coptic was supplanted by Arabic between the 8th and the 14th centuries. Most of the extant Coptic texts are religious works translated from the Greek.

Coptic resembles demotic Egyptian except that in Coptic many pagan terms have been replaced by religious terms of Greek origin.