ABSTRACT
Recent work on bi- and multilingualism in the Roman world has revealed a complex world of code-switching, borrowing, loaning, interference and other phenomena which arose as a result of the sustained language contact which the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman empire made possible. Valuable witnesses to the translation of Christian scripture and other texts, and the way Christian missionaries, preachers and teachers interacted in non-Hellenophone (or bilingual) situations, may be derived from literary sources, such as those from the western empire. Egypt provides the opportunity to examine the papyrological record, not only for a deeper analysis of the multilingual world in which these interactions took place but also the physical traces of translation and communication across languages in the papyri. Coptic palaeography remains less than perfectly understood in general; even in the case of Greek texts, palaeography is not a precise enough tool as to confidently state on which side of the Constantinian revolution a text may fall.
