Coptic Grammar recommendations?

[vegfarandi]

Which one is the best for a good overview of the language?

Main options I've found are:

Introduction to Sahidic Coptic: A New Coptic Grammar
by Thomas O Lambdin

An Elementary Coptic Grammar Of The Sahidic Dialect
by C. C. Walters

A Coptic Learning Grammar (Sahidic) (Subsidia et Instrumenta Linguarum Orientis)
by Johanna Brankaer

An Introductory Coptic Grammar. Sahudic Dialect.
by J. Martin. PLUMLEY

Has anybody read any of these and have a recommendation?

[Ares Land]

I was hoping someone more qualified would chime in...

I suppose you have access to the Language Pile: Leyton's Coptic Grammar seems pretty good.
Plumley's is a bit too short and synthetic to my tastes. It's basically a long list of tables with laconic comments, and it's a bit hard to follow. The good thing with Leyton is that he writes quite a bit on syntax.

(I'd love to get into the various stages of Egyptian... but for some reason the grammars are awfully hard to read.)

[fusijui]

What Ares Land said.

What I find forbidding about Coptic & Egyptian language in general is that 95% of it is written not from a linguistic perspective, or even a general old-school philological one, but a specialized Egyptological one, which I've never been able to make myself digest. It makes Sinology feel breathtakingly cosmopolitan and modern -- practically 20th-century, even!

So I can't help, but am also watching this thread in hope of some guidance.

[Kuchigakatai]

What I find forbidding about Coptic & Egyptian language in general is that 95% of it is written not from a linguistic perspective, or even a general old-school philological one, but a specialized Egyptological one, which I've never been able to make myself digest. It makes Sinology feel breathtakingly cosmopolitan and modern -- practically 20th-century, even!

I've heard Antonio Loprieno's Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (1995) is great as an introduction to the whole of Egyptian for linguistics-minded types (and also as an introduction to linguistics for Egyptologists...), although I've been told the pronunciation reconstructions it has are wild and bad. But it looks decent when it comes to syntax and the morphology spelled with consonants.

This year James P. Allen, the author of the textbook Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (1st ed. 1999, 3rd ed. 2014), also published a reconstruction of Egyptian in its various stages this year, Ancient Egyptian Phonology (2020). He also has a grammar of Old Egyptian based on Unas's pyramid's texts from the 24th century BC, A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, volume 1: Unis (2017), which is also interesting because:

I have gradually come to the realization that our analysis of the ancient Egyptian language—Old and Middle Egyptian in particular, and later stages to a lesser extent—has been warped by the unconscious biases that our translations impose on the material. We have, for example, divided the single written form of the Late Egyptian sḏm.f into two inflected forms, preterite and prospective/subjunctive, because it regularly has one or the other meaning. [...] Accordingly, the present study makes no assumptions about grammatical categories that are not adequately represented in the written data. Readers familiar with more traditional studies of Egyptian grammar will find a number of innovations here.

Sadly, following standard practice for grammars of ancient literary languages, the book has no glosses. sometimes I think of writing a Latin grammar myself... if only to be the first to write one with glosses.........

Note: I don't claim to have read any of these books with any good level of care/attention.

[bradrn]

What I find forbidding about Coptic & Egyptian language in general is that 95% of it is written not from a linguistic perspective, or even a general old-school philological one, but a specialized Egyptological one, which I've never been able to make myself digest. It makes Sinology feel breathtakingly cosmopolitan and modern -- practically 20th-century, even!

I've heard Antonio Loprieno's Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (1995) is great as an introduction to the whole of Egyptian for linguistics-minded types (and also as an introduction to linguistics for Egyptologists...), although I've been told the pronunciation reconstructions it has are wild and bad. But it looks decent when it comes to syntax and the morphology spelled with consonants.

Really? As it happens, I’m reading that book now after your earlier recommendation, and its reconstructed pronunciations look fairly reasonable to me (not that I would know)… do you have any more details on what’s wrong with them? (Though I can confirm that it’s accessible to linguists, not just Egyptologists.)

[Kuchigakatai]

Really? As it happens, I’m reading that book now after your earlier recommendation, and its reconstructed pronunciations look fairly reasonable to me (not that I would know)… do you have any more details on what’s wrong with them? (Though I can confirm that it’s accessible to linguists, not just Egyptologists.)

I've heard that in that book he excessively assumes the same few patterns for a too large number of words, and that assuming j and w are always /j w/ is probably unwarranted. Please note I don't know what I'm talking about; I'm not familiar with Egyptian ling at all. I'm just passing you this second-hand.

[fusijui]

Loprieno is good, I agree (for non-Egyptologists like us, I mean), and that's really most of the 5% I had in mind in my earlier post. But it's a fairly small book that covers the entire history of Egyptian language(s), and doesn't have much to say about Coptic... it's sort of one big tease

[vegfarandi]

I ended up getting Lambdin's grammar. It's not a reference grammar but a teaching grammar. Thankfully my Greek reading ability is decent enough that I can get through the non-Romanized Coptic sample texts. The downside is that it might be harder to get the holistic overview I was hoping for, but the upside is that because it is meant as a beginners' grammar, it's reasonably simple.