Kaph (letter)

Kaph (also spelled kaf) is the eleventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician kāp , Hebrew kāf , Aramaic kāp , Syriac kāp̄ , and Arabic kāf (in abjadi order).

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek kappa (Κ), Latin K, and Cyrillic К.

Origin of kaph

Kaph is thought to be derived from a pictogram of a hand (in both modern Arabic and modern Hebrew, kaph כף means "palm" or "grip"), though in Arabic the ''a'' in the name of the letter (كاف) is pronounced longer than the ''a'' in the word meaning "palm" (كَف).
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Hebrew kaf

Hebrew spelling:

Hebrew pronunciation

The letter kaf is one of the six letters that can receive a dagesh kal. The other five are bet, gimel, daleth, pe, and tav (see Hebrew alphabet for more about these letters).

There are two orthographic variants of this letter that alter the pronunciation:

Kaf with the dagesh

When the kaph has a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, it represents a voiceless velar plosive (). There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used.

Kaf without the dagesh (khaf)

When this letter appears as ''without'' the dagesh ("dot") in its center it represents , like the ''ch'' in German "Bach".

In modern Israeli Hebrew the letter heth is often pronounced as a , but many communities (particularly those of Mizrahi and Sephardi origins, as well as immigrants to Israel from Arab countries and Arab Israelis) have differentiated between these letters as in other Semitic languages.

Final form of kaf

If the letter is at the end of a word the symbol is drawn differently. However, it does not change the pronunciation or transliteration in any way. The name for the letter is ''final kaf'' (). Four additional Hebrew letters take final forms: tsadi, mem, nun, and pei. Kaf/khaf is the only Hebrew letter that can take a vowel in its word-final form, which is pronounced after the consonant, that vowel being the qamatz.

Significance of kaph in Hebrew

In gematria, kaph represents the number 20. Its final form represents 500, but this is rarely used, tav and qoph (400+100) being used instead.

As a prefix, kaph is a preposition:
*It can mean "like" or "as", as in literary Arabic (see below).
*In colloquial Hebrew, kaph and shin together have the meaning of "when". This is a contraction of , ''ka'asher'' (when).

Arabic kāf

The letter is named ''kāf'', and it is written in several ways depending on its position in the word.

There are three variants of the letter:
* the basic form is used for the Arabic language and many other languages:

* the cross-barred form, notably or , is used predominantly as an alternative form of the version above in all forms of Arabic and in the languages that use the Perso-Arabic script.

* the long s-shaped variant form, , which is used in Arabic texts and for writing the Qur'an. It has a particular use in the Sindhi language of Pakistan, where it represents the unaspirated /k/, in contrast to the aspirated /kʰ/, which is written using the "normal" kāf (called '' keheh'').

In varieties of Arabic ''kāf'' is almost universally pronounced as the voiceless velar plosive , but in rural Palestinian and Iraqi, it is pronounced as a voiceless postalveolar affricate .

Use in literary Arabic

In Literary Arabic, ''kāf'', when used as a prefix ', is one of the Arabic words for ''"like"'', ''"as"'', or ''"as though"'' (the other, , is unrelated). For example, (), means "like a bird" or "as though a bird" (as in Hebrew, above) and attached to "this, that" forms the fixed expression "like so, likewise."

''kāf'' is used as a possessive suffix for second-person singular nouns (feminine taking ' , and masculine ' ); for instance, ' ("book") becomes ' ("your book", where the person spoken to is masculine) ' ("your book", where the person spoken to is feminine). At the ends of sentences and often in conversation the final vowel is suppressed, and thus ' ("your book"). In several varieties of vernacular Arabic, however, the ''kāf'' with no harakat is the standard second-person possessive, with the literary Arabic harakah shifted to the letter ''before'' the ''kāf'': thus masculine "your book" in these varieties is ' and feminine "your book" '.

Character encodings

See also

* Ca (Indic)
* Gaf
* Ka (Indic)
* Ngaph

References

{{Northwest Semitic abjad

Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters
Letters with final form