““Yet even when such languages did not face direct official sanction, speakers of older tongues knew that they had little chance of getting on in an Arabic world. By the eleventh century, Coptic and Syriac were declining as major languages, and the compiler of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria translated the work into Arabic because “today Arabic is the language that the people of Egypt know…most of them being ignorant of Coptic and Greek.”18””
