Did Greek Influence the Coptic Preference for Prefixing? A Quantitative-Typological Perspective

The present article takes a quantitative approach to investigating contact-induced change, using typological parameters established for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison. Specifically, it examines the likelihood that a socio-politically dominant language, Greek (Indo-European), influenced the morphological structure of a socio-politically subordinate indigenous language, Coptic (Afroasiatic). Based on the high prefixing score of Coptic and the much lower prefixing score of Greek, it is concluded that it is highly unlikely that Greek had any significant or direct influence on the strong prefixing preference of Coptic.