Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Introduction. Iv
In other words, he tried to make their order approximate to that of Birch,
the letters of the English Alphabet.
In E. de Rouge's Egyptian Alphabet (Chrestomathie gyp- E. de 1
. Rouge
tienne, Part I, Paris, 1867) the order of the letters is as follows :
fl' Ik'
' -*'
V)' XN> . ^'
e> ^' J' %*' D> ^'^'
^*' U) ffl '
s=>, ci, A, c=^3, ~"Y J, V\, ^=, ^,-wwvA, O,,^a,, *
on, TtTtT, , T, ,
as follows:
'^, (|,
|, ].
o,
, l'i
rD- In Stern's "Glossar" the order is Stern,
J, ^i-^, m, |, \\,()(|, ^^*, ffl, -2^, j^,
The order followed in this Dictionary is: "^v, ti, a, Qd ,
_TP\S' 1 |] DllQ^C.
or \\, ^ or Q, J, a, ^=^, ^^,
, C3n, zi, ^^^6, ffi, o or Jli
,
or _2^, ra ,
Among the words given in this Dictionary are many which
are derived from demotic texts. As my knowledge of this
branch of Egyptology is rudimentary I have relied for the cor-
rectness of their transcription into hieroglyphs chiefly upon the
works of that erratic genius, E. Revillout, and Professor F. LI.
Griffith. These scholars have shown that Demotologists are Demotic
able to transcribe demotic texts into hieroglyphs, and Birch's words:
view that they were unable to do this is no longer tenable.
About the correctness of the meanings of many demotic words
given by them there can be no doubt, for the equivalents of a
great number of them, and their counterparts in form, are to
be found even in the existing Coptic " Scalae " and in the printed
Coptic Vocabularies and Dictionaries of Peyron, Tattam and
Par they.
The references to original documents and to published
editions of them in this Dictionary are, in respect of number,
unsatisfactory. They represent a compromise, and will suffer
the fate of all compromises, that is to say, they will satisfy
nobody. In the great collection of slips which I made first of
all there were to some words as many as sixty references, and
the slips that contained only from six to twelve references were
very few. To print all these was manifestly impossible, for the
references would have occupied far more space than the Egyp- References to
tian words and their meanings. It seemed at first that each publications,
word ought to be followed by a reference, but even so the
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