Qoppa
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Qoppa or Koppa (Ϙ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph. In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced as a uvular stop (IPA: [q]); in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for /k/ before back vowels (Ο and Υ). As the sound /k/ then had two redundant spellings, qoppa was eventually replaced by kappa (Κ). Qoppa remained in use as a letter in some Doric[1] regions into the 5th century BC.
Like all Greek letters, qoppa was also used as a numeral, and had the value of 90. It has continued to be used in this function into modern times, though its shape has changed over time from a Q-like one to a Z-like one ()
The Qoppa was used as a symbol for the city of Corinth, which had the early spelling of Ϙόρινθος. Qoppa is also the source of the Latin letter Q and the archaic Cyrillic numeral koppa (Ҁ).
In the Unicode computer encoding standard, there are two pairs of codepoints to represent Qoppa: U+03D8/U+03D9 ("Greek Letter Archaic Koppa" and "Greek Small Letter Archaic Koppa", Ϙϙ), intended for representing the epigraphic Q-like glyph, and U+03DE/U+03DF ("Greek Letter Koppa" and "Greek Small Letter Koppa", Ϟϟ), intended for the numeric Z-like glyphs.[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer[2]by Roger D. Woodard
- Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet[3] by Barry B. Powell
- The Grammar of Attic Inscriptions[4] by Leslie Threatte