- Qoppa
Qoppa or Koppa (unicode|Ϙ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the
Greek alphabet , derived from Phoenicianqoph . In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced as a uvular stop (IPA2|q); in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for IPA|/k/ beforeback vowel s (Ο ,Υ andΩ ). As the sound IPA|/k/ then had two redundant spellings,Fact|date=July 2008 qoppa was eventually replaced bykappa (Κ). Qoppa remained in use as a letter in some Doric regions into the5th century BC . [cite book |title=Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer |last=Woodard |first=Roger D. |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=1997 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |isbn=0195105206 |pages= |url= ]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 ()
The Qoppa was used as a symbol for the city of
Corinth , which had the early spelling of unicode|Ϙόρινθος. Qoppa is also the source of the Latin letterQ and the archaic Cyrillic numeralkoppa (unicode|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", unicode|Ϙϙ), intended for representing the epigraphic Q-like glyph, and U+03DE/U+03DF ("Greek Letter Koppa" and "Greek Small Letter Koppa", unicode|Ϟϟ), intended for the numeric Z-like glyphs. [Note that computer fonts used in browsers may show these codepoints differently.]ee also
*
Qoph
*Q
*Koppa References
Further reading
*cite book |title=Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet |last=Powell |first=Barry B. |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=1991 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=New York |isbn=0521371570 |pages= |url=
*cite book |title=The Grammar of Attic Inscriptions |last=Threatte |first=Leslie |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=1980 |publisher=Walter de Gruyter |location=Berlin |isbn=3110073447 |pages= |url=
*cite book |title=Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer |last=Woodard |first=Roger D. |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=1997 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |isbn=0195105206 |pages= |url=External links
* [http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html#koppa Greek Unicode Issues: Koppa]
* [http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/nonattic.html#koppa Greek Unicode Issues: Archaic Koppa]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
