Kaph (also spelled kaf) is the eleventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician kÃÂp ð¤Â, Hebrew kÃÂpà, Aramaic kÃÂp ð¡Â, Syriac kÃÂpàÃÂ, and Arabic kÃÂf (in abjadi order). It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian ðªÂâÂÂ, South Arabian , and Ge'ez .
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek kappa (ÃÂ), Latin K, and Cyrillic ÃÂ.
Kaph is thought to be derived from a pictogram of the palm of a hand (in both modern Arabic and Hebrew, kaph means "palm" or "grip"), though in Arabic the a in the name of the letter (ÃÂçÃÂ) is pronounced longer than the a in the word meaning "palm" (ÃÂÃÂÃÂ). The small é above the kÃÂf in its final and isolated forms was originally âÂÂalÃÂmatu-l-ihmÃÂl, but became a permanent part of the letter. Previously this sign could also appear above the medial form of kÃÂf, instead of the stroke on its ascender. <hiero>D46</hiero>
The letter is named kÃÂf, and it is written in several ways depending on its position in the word.
There are four variants of the letter:
Other than the four variants of the letter kÃÂf as mentioned below, there are also five other variants of the Persian letter gaf, namely,
In Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Azerbaijani, Uyghur, Moroccan Arabic, Xiao'erjing script, the Arabic letter ng has two forms, namely:
There is also one another variant of the letter ng, which is the letter khe with three dots below, and it is thus written as:
In the Sindhi alphabet, the letter gaf with two dots above is used, and it is thus written as:
There is also letter gueh in the Sindhi alphabet. Gueh is thus written as:
Before 1928, the Nogai alphabet was written in Arabic script. There is one such letter based on a basic form of kÃÂf with three dots below, and it is thus written as:
In varieties of Arabic kÃÂf is almost universally pronounced as the voiceless velar plosive , but in rural Palestinian and Iraqi, it is pronounced as a voiceless postalveolar affricate .
In Arabic, kÃÂf, when used as a prefix ', functions as a comparative preposition (, such as or ) and can carry the meaning of English words "like", "as", or "as though" . 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."
When adjoined at the end of a word, kÃÂf 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 kÃÂf with no harakat is the standard second-person possessive, with the literary Arabic harakah shifted to the letter before the kÃÂf: thus masculine "your book" in these varieties is ' and feminine "your book" '.
Hebrew spelling: <big></big>
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:
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.
When this letter appears as without the dagesh ("dot") in its center it represents , like the ch in German "Bach", or , like ch in Scottish English "loch".
In modern Israeli Hebrew the letter heth is often pronounced the same way. However, Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs living in Israel have differentiated between these letters as in other Semitic languages.
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: mem, nun, pei and tsadi. 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.
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: