This book is not a Coptic grammar, nor is it cast in the semblance of one: it is a series of studies of a fairly central area of Coptic syntax, a detailed systematic charting of a subsystem or more or less continuous range of grammatical phenomena.

In a terminological note with the title, “The Possessive Relation Marker in Coptic” (Enchoria 12:191–193, 1984), P. Swiggers criticizes and corrects the conventional designation “possessive article” or “possessive prefix” for ⲡⲁ-/ⲧⲁ-/ⲛⲁ- “he/she/they of-” and, much less explicitly, {ⲡⲉϥ-} “his”. Following several arguments meant to establish that these morpheme set(s) are “neither an article, nor a prefix”, Dr. Swiggers offers to replace the current terms with a new one, namely “possessive relation-marker”, presumably for both {ⲡⲁ-} and {ⲡⲉϥ-}.

There can be no doubt that of all issues of Coptic pattern grammar, it is the Nominal Sentence that has had the most monographic attention. Whatever the reasons for this special cultivation — the relative familiarity of this pattern set (known in similar forms from Egyptian and Semitic), its (again relative) compactness and transparency as regards internal structure and external relations of its constituents, the urge of typological interest in a verbless prediction pattern — the happy outcome is that today, although many details are still controversial, the patterns have been by and large isolated and their formal (if not always functional) analysis more or less agreed upon […]

The book before us is by no means yet another text edition: it is difficult to overstate its importance — comparable, in my opinion, to that of Thompson’s Subakhmîmic John — or over-praise the editor for a perfect execution of his task. This edition will, I believe, prove a veritable milestone in the story of Coptic grammatical and dialectological research. For here wer are offered the first extensive testo di lingua for this ‘new’ dialect, for which we have hitherto had the evidence of lacunary or very short fragments […]

The following discussion aims primarily at a tentative application of explicit text-linguistic analytic procedure to a special Late Egyptian corpus hitherto subjected but to superficial linguistic attention, viz. the Egyptian oracular texts (here I shall examine the Late Egyptian, not the Demotic evidence). However, a secondary goal of this paper is to make a contribution towards an aspect of a general theory of the dialogue: in viewing the texts which constitute the discussed corpus as embryonic dialogue-forms, I will attempt to explore some ideas for a schematic-typological approach to defining and characterizing these dialogues in general.