would expect it from Greek. However, whereas Ancient Greek has two phonologi-
cally contrastive stress types which are distinguished by three accent marks (acute
' and grave * as allographs on the one hand, circumflex " on the other), both Coptic
texts confuse this distinction. The manuscript edited by Crum does not employ the
circumflex mark at all, and the manuscript edited by Winstedt uses all three accent
marks indiscriminately. This seems to indicate that the pitch distinction of Ancient
Greek was unfamiliar to the Copts.

The Greek - Old Coptic bilingual Paris Magical Papyrus (= pBibl. Nat. suppl. gr.
574)3^9, to be dated from the 4th century ad, employs two Greek diacritics within the
Coptic passages, namely the spiritus asper (') to mark the phoneme /h/ and the acute
accent (') to mark word stress. Curiously, no accent marks are used in the Greek
passages of the same manuscript.^0

We find that the acute accent usually falls on syllables we expect to be stressed,34i
but by far not all stressed syllables are supplied with this diacritic. I suggest that
phrase accent might have played an additional role. Consider the following passage
(line ii2f., text and translation based on Satzinger 1994b: 215):

CN6.I RA04 eriT ccon NA04 en jiecnob novcipe j\eiy rench£'

bring it before-me dip it in the-blood of-Osiris give-it that-we-appeal

"Bring it before me. Dip it in the blood of Osiris. Hand it over, and we will
appeal (magically)."
The object pronoun MAO4 "it" certainly had an own word stress as is evidenced by
its O-vowel. However it lacks an accent mark in both occurrences here. It is possible
that, although the pronoun was stressed, its accent was little prominent relative to
the whole phrase. Further research on this text would appear promising.
Till (1981b, cf. especially p. 4f.) has edited a manuscript written in the Akhmimic
dialect which uses the acute accent (') as a stress marker. This marker always falls
where we expect word stress, but it is applied to only 25 different words altogether,
which is a small percentage of the total number of words in this text. Most of the
marked stressed syllables either contain a long vowel (i.e. a vowel written double)
or a diphthong. There is also a single example of an accentuated Greek loan word:
[n£]Tp.M:X£l "he who cares" (from ueXsiv "to care") (Till 1981b: 26, line 21).

339 The latest edition of the Coptic passages is by Satzinger (1994b).

340 As can be judged from two sample photographs of the text in Deissmann (1928: 2i8f.).
The standard text edition (Preisendanz 1978: I, 64-180) is misleading in this point
since diacritics are added by the editor, as is common in classical philology.

341 Marked mostly on the nucleus but sometimes on the offglide and once (TO'S'Hi, line
151) on the onset. Some words have more than one accent mark (OTT&K line 114, IOJ1I
line 114, TS&MINI line 118), sometimes the accent is left of what we would expect
([€?]fso?r line 97, n&Be^ line 108, €?v(uB line 115), which is perhaps a mere
graphical inaccuracy.

272