The Coptic Grammatical Tradition of the Muqaddimāt

In this article, I argue that the thirteenth-century grammatical treatises al-muqaddimāt al-khams, although belonging to the same genre and often transmitted together, constitute five individual and innovative texts. The characteristics of each muqaddimah allow us to trace the different stages of the transformation of Coptic into a classical language with its own grammatical tradition. To this end, I analyze the structural features of the muqaddimāt and how they relate to the different stages of development that the Coptic grammatical tradition underwent. The pioneering muqaddimah of al-Samannūdī was followed by the more systematized grammars by Ibn al-ʿAssāl and Ibn Kātib Qayṣar. Ibn Kātib Qayṣar also applied the terminology of the Arabic grammatical tradition more stringently to Coptic grammar. Al-Qalyūbī departs from this method in favor of a more descriptive approach to Coptic and highlights methods of translation from Coptic to Arabic. Ibn al-Duhayrī comments on the grammatical positions of his predecessors in dialectal fashion and thus constitutes the endpoint in the development of the muqaddimah from a brief introduction to Coptic grammar to a scholarly genre.