Okay, did a quick search and I didn't see a thread on Coptic names, unless I didn't see it.
So, what are some popular first names for Coptic boys and girls?
Can you provide some pronunciations too? Thank you.
You can't find much, or at least I didn't, googling. I did come across a site or two with a few names.
One name for boys I came across was "Nabil." I'm thinking that is pronounced "Nay-bill"?
Nabil is not a Coptic name. It is an Arabic name, meaning "Noble". It is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, since that's where the long vowel is (نبيل
- something like "Na-beel", not "Naybill". It is a religiously neutral name, so Copts and Muslims may both have it. There is a man in my parish named Nabil, in fact. It is a male name. The female version is "Nabila", but I don't know anyone with that name.
There a lot of Coptic names that are actually Greek or even Latin, but that Coptic people usually pronounce in their own way. Names like Mina ("Mee-na"; this is an exclusively
male name amongst Copts, whereas for other people it is usually female) or Boctor (from "Victor") are two examples of this. For ladies names like Diana (usually pronounced "Dee-ana" with a long vowel in the first syllable) or Marina ("Ma-ree-na") are examples of this, since neither come from Coptic. Even what we might think of as a relatively common English name like George has a particular pronunciation among Copts, via Coptic and finally Arabic: Girgis (pronounced sort of like "Gear-gis"), also spelled Gerges, Guirguis, etc. (Though we have two Georges at my parish, they are both just "George"...no fancy Arabic for them.)
Truly Coptic names (not Greek, Copto-Arabic, or Latin) are perhaps less popular here in the diaspora, where if you name your kid "Abanoub" ("aba-noob") people look at you weird and start nervously dialing the NSA, but you can still find plenty of them. Abanoub is a male name, from the famous child-martyr of Nehissa in the Nile delta, 4th century AD. He is very popular, so the name is very popular (this is true of many saints names, like Demiana for women, from St. Demiana). Often times you'll find Copts with one Coptic name and one Arabic one, like the modern martyr Abanoub Kamal. Another very popular Coptic name for men is Bishoy (sometimes written "Pishoy", but always pronounced "Bishoy" unless you're trying to sound very European), from the 4th century Egyptian desert father of the same name. I've even met non-Coptic people (Syriac people) with this name, it is so popular. I think the Greeks call him "Pasios", since they don't have the "sh" sound in their language that both Coptic and Arabic (and English) do. There are several names that are like that, too, like Serapion (in Copto-Arabic pronunciation, Sarabamoun - "Sa-ra-ba-moon"), which ultimately comes from the pre-Christian Egpytian "Serapis" and "Amun" (names of two of the gods in the pre-Christian Egyptian pantheon), but has probably been adopted more often by Syriac people. There is a bishop by the name of HG Bishop Serapion in Los Angeles Diocese of the Coptic Orthodox Church, but other than that if you look up that name you find a lot of connections to Antioch, where an early Patriarch in the 2nd or 3rd century went by that name, and it was the name of a 9th century Syriac physician, etc. There was a lot of interaction between the Copts and the Syriac people for centuries, to the point where we borrowed some of their liturgical prayers ("The Syrian Fraction"), and even one of the most famous Coptic monasteries is actually known as "The Monastery of the Syrians" (Deir al-Suriyani), and a few of the Coptic Popes of the 9th and 10th centuries were not ethnically Coptic/Egyptian, but Syrians/Syriac people (not "Syrians" in the modern sense of Arabs; I mean speakers of Syriac/Medieval Aramaic).
The name "Dioscoros" ("Dee-o-skor-ous") appears to have survived in Ethiopia and Eritrea and among the Syriacs in both the Middle East and India (as a religious name, anyway; I've only ever seen it assumed by bishops, never by laity), though honestly I've seen that one associated with any Egyptian since the saint himself...perhaps due to the controversy following Chalcedon when the Greeks foolishly deposed him? I don't know. Anyway, with a name like that I would think that it's of Greek origin rather than Coptic, but I can't find anything on it, and it's not like a Greek would ever name themselves after a man they consider to be a heretic anyway, so we might as well consider it a Coptic name.
