“The service – like all the liturgies of desert Egypt – was conducted in Coptic, a direct descendant of the ancient tongue of the Pharaohs. The same tongue that had sung the praise of the Christian God in this church for more than one and half thousand years had been used in the great Pharaonic temples of Thebes to praise Isis and Horus for the three thousand years preceding that: of the sacred tongues of the world, only Sanskrit has a comparable antiquity. It is a strange and exotic language whose elliptical conflation of syllables sounded as though they had been specially designed for the uttering of incantations: ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen,’ became ‘Khenevran emeviot nem ipshiri nembi ebnevma esoweb enowti enowti ami...’”
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2 comments:
is this william any relation to Theodore Dalrymple?
To be honest, I didn't know who Theodore was. However, Wikipedia knows all, and told me that Theodore is a pen name, which means I'm guessing he and William are not related. I like their last name though...
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