← Tsade               Qoph               Resh →
Phoenician	Hebrew	Aramaic	Syriac	Arabic
Image:Phoenician qof.svg	ק		ܩ	ﻕ
Phonemic representation:				kˁ, q
Position in alphabet:				19
Numerical (Gematria/Abjad) value:				100

Qoph or Qop (In Hebrew: Kuf, Arabic: Qāf) is the nineteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, 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/.

It became over time the letter Q in the Latin alphabet, 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 (Qaph in Arabic meant the nape).

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: [g]).

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 is named 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 IPA: [q] as its standard pronunciation of the letter, but in northern Egyptian Arabic, as well as Levantine Arabic, the letter is often pronounced as the hamza or glottal stop /ʔ/; in Sa'idi Arabic (the Arabic of the Sa'id, Southern or Upper Egypt), it is frequently pronounced the voiced velar plosive, /ɡ/; and in rural Palestinian Arabic it is often pronounced as /k/. This variance has led to the confusion over the spelling of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi's name in Latin letters.

The Maghribi style of writing qaf is different. Once the pervailant 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

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Qoph"