Radika Kesavan wrote in
:

saki wrote:

...but I have yet to find a rose with a Coptic name. :-)

I thought that Zoe was a Coptic name, the name for Eve, but do not
know for sure. If it is, there are some roses with the name Zoe in
them....

Only "Zoe" means "life" in Greek; not related to Coptic, which was Egyptian
in grammar as was much of its vocabulary but written with mostly Greek
letterforms and with lots of Greek loan words.

The Coptic word for "rose" seems to have been "ourt" (transliteration...I
can't type in Coptic here, for which you'll no doubt thank me :-) from the
Egyptian Demotic "wrt" (a form of the language that slightly preceded
Coptic). "wrt" was a Semitic loan word.

To my amazement, Egypt didn't have roses until the Hellenistic period, and
then the word had to be borrowed from the cultures where it was
established. There are cognates throughout the region that appear to cross
over into other language families. Semitic languages were Afroasiatic
whereas Indo-European languages had similar names for the flower: Sanskrit
"vrdhi", Armenian "vard", Greek "rhodon" and Latin "rosa".

It's a very old name indeed.

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