Wiktionary:About Coptic

This page describes policies and practices specific to Coptic entries on the English Wiktionary. These are in addition to Wiktionary’s overall standards which are listed at Entry layout explained.

Diacritical marks
Supralinear strokes and the Bohairic jinkim should be used in headword lines, but not in page names. Thus, is located at the title. The jinkim should be represented as a combining grave accent, and supralinear strokes in other dialects indicating syllabicity should be represented as macrons above the syllabic character. For nomina sacra, the combining overline should be input with U+0305, and again used in headword lines, but not in page titles.

Other sporadically appearing diacritics such as circumflexes, acute accents, and the like should generally not be used in entry names or headword lines of main lemmas, but may appear (if attested) in soft-redirecting alternative-form entries.

Sorting
Coptic sortkeys are generated by a sortkey module (Module:cop-sortkey). To ensure that entries are properly sorted, please use headword templates to add part-of-speech categories, or the templates and.

The sortkey module converts the Greek-derived Coptic letters to the corresponding Greek letters  to ensure that they sort before the uniquely Coptic letters. Thus, the headers on Coptic category pages use the Greek letters rather than Coptic letters.

Dialects
Coptic encompasses a number of dialects, several of which are given names that vary from author to author. All Coptic entries should be marked to indicate which dialect(s) that form is attested in. Conventionally, each dialect is also represented by a short (usually single-letter) abbreviation or siglum; some of the more marginal dialects have no settled name beyond their siglum. These sigla can be used in and in headword-line templates, but  must always use the dialect's full name.

On Wiktionary, the names used for the dialects of Coptic are standardized as follows:

This amounts to thirteen attested dialects. Other lects that are no longer recognized as constituting separate dialects, and therefore should not be used, include Dialects C, D, E, and N.

Note that sigla may vary between different dictionaries. Importantly, note that for Old Coptic, Crum (and derivative works) use O for Old Coptic, and Coptic Dictionary Online uses K.

Within some of the Coptic dialects there are a number of subdialects, mostly unnamed and so identified solely by sigla, such as the subdialects L4, L5, and L6 of Lycopolitan (L). When some feature is peculiar to a subdialect, it can be labeled with the name of the dialect followed by the subdialectal siglum:

Parts of speech
All Coptic headwords should go under a part-of-speech header, either a level 3 header if there's one etymology or a level 4 header if there are multiple etymologies, per WT:EL.

Native Egyptian words from certain parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions) may appear in different forms that are called states depending on whether they govern following nouns or pronouns. These are the absolute state, the nominal state and the pronominal state. The nominal and the pronominal states are sometimes collectively called the construct state (but in older texts construct state may be a synonym of the nominal state). The absolute state does not immediately govern another word (though it may govern a following word by way of a genitive or object marker), is unmarked and is preferred as the lemma form. The nominal state directly governs nouns and is displayed in the dictionary with a hyphen (-) at the end. It is preferred over the pronominal state as the lemma form, but should only be used as the lemma if no absolute state is attested (this is generally the case for prepositions). The pronominal state directly governs pronouns and is displayed on Wiktionary having a double oblique hyphen (⸗) at the end.