Coptic fonts

In terms of computer typography Coptic font represents a set of characters or letters, which are used for writing texts in a specific language, namely in Coptic. Generally speaking, Coptic font contains letters from the ancient alphabet, which is known to be the first alphabetic script for the Egyptian language.

This alphabet, being the writing system for the Coptic language and the background for all modern Coptic fonts, dates back to the first century. Till the 17th century Coptic remained the primary language spoken in Egypt. Later the Arabic language supplanted Coptic and became dominant on the territory of Egypt and practically the whole North Africa. It is interesting to note that now it is estimated that only about 300 people speak Coptic in everyday life. However, it is still used as the official language for Coptic Church.

Coptic alphabet, supported by all Coptic font representatives, such as MPH 2B Damase, was developed on the basis of the ancient Greek letters. Also, a few Demotic symbols were added to it in order to represent the sounds, which were not available in ancient Greek. All in all Coptic font contains 24 letters, borrowed from Greek, and 6 or 7 characters (depending on the dialect), taken from Demotic. Interestingly, that Coptic language is believed to have a significant influence on the development of Cyrillic alphabet. When comparing character maps from Coptic and Cyrillic, the resemblance between these two scripts becomes more than obvious.

Fonts2u offers a progressively new approach to finding, viewing, and downloading free computer fonts. The site allows hunting for a necessary font by selecting particular font characters, and character map is one of them. For example, in order to find Coptic fonts, it is necessary to select the Coptic alphabet in the drop-down list of supported character maps. After pressing the Search button the system will display those fonts, which meet the specified parameters.