Diachronic lexical semantics in Ancient Egyptian–Coptic: The Egyptianness of basic vocabulary in Coptic

Coptic, as it comes down to us in written texts, is massively influenced by Greek in the domain of lexicon. The Leipzig-Berlin Dictionary and Database of Greek Loanwords in Coptic project has already recorded c. 5000 loan word types and c. 60.000 loan word tokens. On this basis, linguists, philologists, and historians often make assumptions about the nature and extent of bilingualism. Some linguists have even proposed that Coptic is a case of ‘code-mixing’ of Egyptian and Greek, which assumes extensive bilingualism among Egyptians in Late Antiquity. In this paper, we tackle this question from another angle, by determining the extent to which Greek influenced Coptic in terms of its *basic vocabulary*. It may be that we can learn more about bilingualism in Late Antique Egypt this way, since overall lexical borrowing need not correlate with lexical borrowing in the domain of basic vocabulary. As a (significant) side effect of this study, we can also describe the rate of replacement of basic vocabulary in Egyptian-Coptic across its 4000 years of attestation, as well as the semantic domains and periods in which lexical replacement was faster or slower.