James P. Allen. Coptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects. Eisenbrauns imprint of The Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 2020.It is fascinating that, even in a relatively small geographic area like Egypt, isolating six dialects is not fine-grained enough to capture the linguistic diversity of an ancient language. "Dialects" are, of course, artificial slices of a continuous linguistic field that varied from village to village, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and ultimately from person to person.... Egyptologist James P. Allen’s new Coptic dialect grammar is therefore useful for anyone beginning to grapple with language variation, with the proviso that the study of Coptic dialects is a relatively underdeveloped discipline whose present state and shape do not yet allow for the creation of the more effective tools that should one day become possible. There does remain a justifiable frustration to studying Coptic dialects, but this is often attributable to the nature of the texts and the underlying disciplinary research. ...
Cross-file under Coptic Watch.
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