UD_Coptic-Bohairic contains manually annotated Bohairic Coptic texts, including Biblical narrative and poetic texts, epistles, and hagiography.
The Bohairic Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank is a manually annotated corpus of Bohairic Coptic texts, currently containing excerpts from the Bohairic New Testament Gospel of Mark, 1 Corinthians, the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, lives of Sts. Isaac and Shenoute, and the Coptic version of the Lausiac History. Detailed information about the treebank is available in the reference paper cited below.
The data was digitized or previously available in digital format, and annotated manually for part of speech in the project Coptic Scriptorium. For individual credit and further information see:
Native Coptic XPOS tags come from the Coptic Scriptorium tag set, which is available from the project and treebank websites.
| subcorpus | documents | tokens |
|---|---|---|
| bohairic.1corinthians | bohairic.1Cor 1-7 | 4,789 |
| bohairic.habakkuk | bohairic.Habakkuk 1-3 | 1,988 |
| bohairic.lausiac.history | bohairic.lausiac.history 1 | 4,453 |
| bohairic.life.isaac | bohairic.life.isaac 1 | 5,433 |
| bohairic.life.shenoute | bohairic.life.shenoute 1 | 4,970 |
| bohairic.mark | bohairic.Mark 1-9 | 11,091 |
| Total: | 32,724 |
Coptic was originally written in scriptio continua, without spaces, and modern conventions fuse multiple tokens into so-called bound groups, collapsing clitic pronouns, prepositions and other morphemes into single orthographic units.
The Coptic Treebanks annotate these bound groups as 'multi-word' tokens (MWTs). However, morphological units below the POS level, including affixes and fused compounds (incorporation), are annotated in the treebank in the MISC column, using an attribute MSeg=A-B-C, where A, B and C are constituent morphemes of a complex word. There is also a further attribute in the MISC column, called Orig, which appears whenever normalization has taken place and renders the word form as it appeared in the original manuscript. This can include removal of optional diacritics and contracted forms of nomina sacra, which appear expanded in the word form column.
Note that for some fused forms carrying multiple parts of speech, the native Coptic POS tag set assigns portmanteau tags, such as APST_PPERS (auxiliary, past, fused with a subject personal pronoun). In the UD guidelines for Coptic, these forms are tolerated by always selecting the argument as the function-determining unit. Thus APST_PPERS, the past auxiliary with fused pronoun, is attached as nsubj, ignoring the aux dependency. In a future version, we are considering integrating a more subtle analysis using enhanced dependencies.
For more information on Coptic tokenization, see the Coptic Scriptorium website.
The data contains partial annotations of typed named and non-named entities (not yet complete for all documents), using the same ten entity types as UD_English-GUM and UD_Coptic-Scriptorium:
- abstract
- animal
- event
- object
- organization
- person
- place
- plant
- substance
- time
These annotations appear in the MISC column and are bracketed in the conllua convention described by Universal Anaphora and the CorefUD format. Named entities for which corresponding Wikipedia articles exist are also suffixed with a Wikification identifier corresponding to the title of their Wikipedia page, as seen for example for Paul the Apostle and Jesus in the following example:
# newdoc id = bohairic.1corinthians:bohairic.1Cor_01
# global.Entity = etype-identity
# meta::author = Paul the apostle
# meta::document_cts_urn = urn:cts:copticLit:nt.1cor.bohairic_ed:1
# meta::source = Hany Takla, Marcion Project
# meta::title = Bohairic 1 Corinthians 1 (Digital Edition)
# sent_id = bohairic_1corinthians-bohairic_1Cor_01_s0001
# text_en = Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,
# text = ⲡⲁⲩⲗⲟⲥ ⲡⲁⲡⲟⲥⲧⲟⲗⲟⲥ ⲉⲧⲑⲁϩⲉⲙ ⲛⲧⲉⲓⲏⲥⲟⲩⲥ ⲡⲭⲣⲓⲥⲧⲟⲥ ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ϩⲓⲧⲉⲛⲫⲟⲩⲱϣ ⲙⲫⲛⲟⲩϯ ⲛⲉⲙⲥⲱⲥⲑⲉⲛⲏⲥ ⲡⲓⲥⲟⲛ
1 ⲡⲁⲩⲗⲟⲥ ⲡⲁⲩⲗⲟⲥ PROPN NPROP Foreign=Yes 0 root _ Entity=(person-Paul_the_Apostle|OrigLang=grc
2-3 ⲡⲁⲡⲟⲥⲧⲟⲗⲟⲥ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
2 ⲡ ⲡ DET ART Definite=Def|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|PronType=Art 3 det _ _
3 ⲁⲡⲟⲥⲧⲟⲗⲟⲥ ⲁⲡⲟⲥⲧⲟⲗⲟⲥ NOUN N Foreign=Yes 1 appos _ OrigLang=grc
4-5 ⲉⲧⲑⲁϩⲉⲙ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
4 ⲉⲧ ⲉⲧⲉ SCONJ CREL _ 5 mark _ _
5 ⲑⲁϩⲉⲙ ⲑⲱϩⲉⲙ VERB VSTAT VerbForm=Fin 3 acl:relcl _ _
6-7 ⲛⲧⲉⲓⲏⲥⲟⲩⲥ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
6 ⲛⲧⲉ ⲛⲧⲉ ADP PREP _ 7 case _ _
7 ⲓⲏⲥⲟⲩⲥ ⲓⲏⲥⲟⲩⲥ PROPN NPROP Foreign=Yes 3 nmod _ Entity=(person-Jesus|OrigLang=heb
8-9 ⲡⲭⲣⲓⲥⲧⲟⲥ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
8 ⲡ ⲡ DET ART Definite=Def|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|PronType=Art 9 det _ _
9 ⲭⲣⲓⲥⲧⲟⲥ ⲭⲣⲓⲥⲧⲟⲥ NOUN N Foreign=Yes 7 appos _ Entity=person-Jesus)|OrigLang=grc
10 ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ADV ADV ExtPos=ADP 13 case _ _
11-13 ϩⲓⲧⲉⲛⲫⲟⲩⲱϣ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
11 ϩⲓⲧⲉⲛ ϩⲓⲧⲉⲛ ADP PREP _ 10 fixed _ _
12 ⲫ ⲡ DET ART Definite=Def|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|PronType=Art 13 det _ Entity=(abstract
13 ⲟⲩⲱϣ ⲟⲩⲱϣ NOUN N _ 5 obl _ _
14-16 ⲙⲫⲛⲟⲩϯ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
14 ⲙ ⲛ ADP PREP _ 16 case _ _
15 ⲫ ⲡ DET ART Definite=Def|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|PronType=Art 16 det _ Entity=(person
16 ⲛⲟⲩϯ ⲛⲟⲩϯ NOUN N _ 13 nmod _ Entity=person)abstract)person-Paul_the_Apostle)
17-18 ⲛⲉⲙⲥⲱⲥⲑⲉⲛⲏⲥ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
17 ⲛⲉⲙ ⲛⲉⲙ ADP PREP _ 18 cc _ _
18 ⲥⲱⲥⲑⲉⲛⲏⲥ ⲥⲱⲥⲑⲉⲛⲏⲥ NOUN N Foreign=Yes 1 conj _ Entity=(person|OrigLang=grc
19-20 ⲡⲓⲥⲟⲛ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
19 ⲡⲓ ⲡⲓ DET ART Definite=Def|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|PronType=Art 20 det _ _
20 ⲥⲟⲛ ⲥⲟⲛ NOUN N _ 18 appos _ Entity=person)We use the MISC field Cxn annotation to distinguish some complex constructions in a Construction Grammar (CxG) framework developed by collaborators from Dagstuhl Seminar 23191 for the integration of CxG analyses into UD trees. Construction labels are always attached to the highest token belonging to the necessary or defining elements of the construction, and carry hierarchical designations, such as a prefix Cxn=Conditional for all conditional constructions, but a more specific Cxn=Conditional-NegativeEpistemic for negative epistemic conditionals (the unrealized type seen in "if one had, then one would have"). Individual elements of a construction, such as the Protasis or the Apodosis are annotated using the CxnElt MISC annotation. For more information and for work using these annotations, please refer to Weissweiler et al. 2024.
The underlying POS tagged material was produced as part of the project Coptic Scriptorium, funded by the NEH (see http://copticscriptorium.org/ for more details). Treebank annotation was done mainly by Nina Speransky and Amir Zeldes. Thanks are also due to Nicholas Wagner for contributions to the annotation of the underlying texts and their POS and entity tagging.
Dataset splits attempt to balance genres across all sets, as well as preserve contiguous documents whenever possible. Sentence and document IDs in the data indicate the respective source texts. Sentences are not shuffled.
To cite the treebank please refer to the following paper:
- Zeldes, Amir, Speransky, Nina, Wagner, Nicholas & Schroeder, Caroline T. (2025). "A UD Treebank for Bohairic Coptic". ArXiv preprint.
@Electronic{ZeldesEtAl2025,
author = {Amir Zeldes and Nina Speransky and
Nicholas Wagner and Caroline T. Schroeder},
title = {A {UD} Treebank for {B}ohairic {C}optic},
howpublished = {Arxiv Preprint},
year = {2025},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18386}
}- 2025-05-15 v2.16
Initial release in Universal Dependencies.
=== Machine readable metadata ==============
Documentation status: complete Data source: manual Data available since: UD v2.16 License: CC BY 4.0 Includes text: yes Lemmas: manual native UPOS: converted from manual XPOS: manual native Features: automatic Relations: manual native Genre: bible fiction nonfiction Contributors: Zeldes, Amir; Speransky, Nina Contributing: elsewhere Contact: amir.zeldes@georgetown.edu
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