...
But, if /T/ was ever "th", it lost that value long
ago because, in the Coptic alphabet it is always written with
tau--and there is no theta in the Coptic alphabet, which is
derived from the Greek one.
Loprieno's phonetic transcription of Coptic certainly has no
theta, ...
... he writes, "this aspiration" (optional aspiration ofI guess this is a description of the pronunciation of the Coptic theta.
t and other letters, leading them to sound like [th] etc) "is still
exhibited by some Coptic dialects such as Bohairic."
Here I wonder if we are confusing what happened to Afroasiatic cognates with what happened to loan words. These things can be very different, when we are talking about rather distantly related languages. Contrast English cognates (via Germanic) of Latin and Greek words with English loan forms of those words, e.g. "five" (cognate) vs. "quint-" (Latin loan) vs. "pent-" (Greek loan). The phonetic correspondences for cognates are quite different from those for loan words. There are even similar mismatches within Germanic: "ship" (cognate) vs. "skip" and "skiff" (loans from Norse).
... Loprieno suggests that the AfroAsiatic *t. and *s. merge into
Eg. /d/, which in turn is realized as an ejective t. AfroAsiatic
emphatic velars *k. and *x. merge into /j-/ (commonly transcribed
d_), for example: AA *wrk. > Eg. w3d_ */`waRij-/ 'green', Sem *warq
(yaroq, in hebrew). However, this d_ is now closer to Tsade:
Tanis is transcribed Tsoan. Egyptian /d/ (heir of *t. and *s.) is
rendered by Semitic tet (t.) in Hebrew and Babylonian, whereas in
the other direction, Tet is rendered in Egyptian by either /d/ or /t/.
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