qoph

← Tsade               Qoph               Resh →
Phoenician	Hebrew	Aramaic	Syriac	Arabic
	ק		ܩ	ﻕ
Alphabetic derivatives		Greek	Latin	Cyrillic
		Ϙ	Q	Ҁ
Phonemic representation:				kˁ, q
Position in alphabet:				19
Numerical (Gematria/Abjad) value:				100

Qoph or Qop (In modern Hebrew: Kuf, Arabic: Qāf) is the nineteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew ק and Arabic alphabet qāf ق (in abjadi order). Its sound value is an emphatic (pharyngealized) velar stop, IPA: [kˁ], or uvular stop /q/. The OHED (Oxford Hebrew English Dictionary) gives the letter Qoph a transliteration value of Q or a K and a final transliteration value as a ck. In Hebrew Gematria, it has the numerical value of 100.

It became over time the letter Q in the Latin alphabet,^{[citation needed]} and the letter Qoppa in certain early varieties of the Greek alphabet.

Origins of Qoph

The origin of Qoph is usually thought to have come from a pictogram of a monkey, with the body and tail shown (In Hebrew, Qoph, spelled in Hebrew letters as קוף, means "monkey", and K'of in Old Egyptian meant a type of monkey).

Others have proposed that it originated from a pictogram of someone's head and neck (Qaf in Arabic meant the nape); qaw is also reconstructed as a proto-Afro-Asiatic word for neck (ḫḫ in Egyptian), and in some dialects of Arabic, qoph is pronounced as a [hamza] ء, a glottal stop in the back of the throat - similar to the part of the throat used to make the sound of the qoph. In hieroglyphs, two determinatives for neck, F10 and F11 [1] (F12 for "nape"), are both vertical lines topped with heads with horns. F10 is a line underneath an ox head (and a cross toward the bottom of the line), which could conceivably have evolved into the Arabic aleph with a hamza on top (the pronounced (and sometimes written) Egyptian Arabic way of saying qaf). The Arabic hamza far more closely resembles the earlier iterations of Aleph Aleph than does the aleph character itself, which is just a vertical line on top of which the hamza can sit [2].

Hebrew Kuf

Orthographic variants
Various Print Fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi Script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ק	ק	ק

Hebrew Pronunciation

In modern Israeli Hebrew, Kuf usually represents /k/; i.e., no distinction is made between Kuf and Kaph. However, many historical groups have made that distinction, with Kuf being pronounced as a voiceless uvular plosive by Iraqi Jews and other Mizrahim (IPA: [q]) or even as a voiced velar plosive by Yemenite Jews (IPA: [ɡ]) (under the influence of Yemeni Arabic).

Significance of Kuf

Kuf in gematria represents the number 100. Sarah is described in Genesis Rabba as "בת ק' כבת כ' שנה לחטא", literally At Kuf years of age, she was like Kaph years of age in sin (i.e. when she was 100 years old, she was as sinless as when she was 20).

Kuf is used in an Israeli phrase: after a child will say something false, one might say "B'Shin Qoph, Resh" (With Shin, Qoph, Resh). These letters spell Sheqer, which is the Hebrew word for a lie. It would be akin to an English speaker saying "That's an L-I-E."

Arabic qāf

The letter ﻕ is named قاف qāf, and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

The text in the folio appears below in modern script. Note how the Qaf's and Fa's are rendered:

منكم فقد ضل سواء السبيل فيما نقضهم ميثـٰـقهم لعنـٰـهم وجعلنا قلوبهم قـٰـسية يحرفون الكلم عن مواضعه ونسوا حظاً مما ذكروا به ولا تزال تطلع

The letter qāf is matched only by ǧīm among Arabic consonants in the number of pronunciations applied to it dialectically. As noted above, Modern Standard Arabic has the voiceless uvular plosive Template:Voiceless uvular plosive as its standard pronunciation of the letter, but dialectical pronunciations vary as follows:

• In northern Egyptian Arabic, as well as Levantine Arabic, the letter is often pronounced as the hamza or glottal stop /ʔ/ but is preserved in several significant words.
• In Sa'idi (the Arabic of the Sa'id, Southern or Upper Egypt) and some forms of Yemeni Arabic, it is frequently pronounced as the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/.
• In rural Palestinian Arabic it is often pronounced as the voiceless velar plosive /k/.
• In the United Arab Emirates, it is often pronounced as the voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/

This variance has led to the confusion over the spelling of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi's name in Latin letters. In Western Arabic dialects the sound IPA: [q] is more preserved but can also be sometimes pronounced /ɡ/ or a simple /k/ under Berber and French influence.

In general, these pronunciations do not carry over into official speech in MSA. However, some Lebanese broadcasters have begun to use the pronunciation /ʔ/ while speaking on television and radio, much to the disapproval of purists and (oddly) Egyptians.

The Maghribi style of writing qaf is different. Once the prevalent style, it is now only used in Maghribi countries for writing Qur'an with the exception of Libya which adopted the Mashriqi form. There is no possibility of confusing it with the letter fa' as fa' is written with a dot underneath in the Maghribi script^[1].

Maghribi qaf

References

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