Kra (letter)

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Kra (ĸ) is a character once used when writing the Kalaallisut language spoken in Greenland. It is visually similar to a Latin small capital letter K and the Cyrillic letter к. Unusually for a Latin letter, it exists only in lower case form (like German ß).

It is used to denote the sound written as [q] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (the voiceless uvular plosive). For collation purposes, it is therefore considered to be a type of 'q', rather than a type of 'k', and should sort near 'q'.

Its Unicode code point is decimal 312 and hexadecimal U+0138. If this is unavailable, 'q' is substituted.

In 1973, a spelling reform replaced the use of Kra with 'q'.[1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/greenlandic.pdf
The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
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