Qoppa

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Categories: Greek letters | Ancient Greece stubs | Writing system stubs

Greek alphabet
Image:Qoppa uc lc.svg
Αα Alpha	Νν Nu
Ββ Beta	Ξξ Xi
Γγ Gamma	Οο Omicron
Δδ Delta	Ππ Pi
Εε Epsilon	Ρρ Rho
Ζζ Zeta	Σσς Sigma
Ηη Eta	Ττ Tau
Θθ Theta	Υυ Upsilon
Ιι Iota	Φφ Phi
Κκ Kappa	Χχ Chi
Λλ Lambda	Ψψ Psi
Μμ Mu	Ωω Omega
Obsolete letters
Digamma	Image:Qoppa uc lc.svg Qoppa
Image:San uc lc.svg San	Image:Sampi uc lc.svg Sampi

Greek diacritics

Qoppa or Koppa (Ϙ) is a letter that was used in early forms of the Greek alphabet, derived from Phoenician qoph. In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced as a uvular stop (IPA: [q]); in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for /k/ before back vowels (Ο and Υ). As the sound /k/ then had two redundant spellings, qoppa was eventually replaced by kappa (Κ). Qoppa remained in use as a letter in some Doric^[1] regions into the 5th century BC.

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 to a Z-like one (Image:Greek qoppa numeric form.png)

The Qoppa was used as a symbol for the city of Corinth, which had the early spelling of Ϙόρινθος. Qoppa is also the source of the Latin letter Q and the archaic Cyrillic numeral koppa (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", Ϙϙ), intended for representing the epigraphic Q-like glyph, and U+03DE/U+03DF ("Greek Letter Koppa" and "Greek Small Letter Koppa", Ϟϟ), intended for the numeric Z-like glyphs.^[2]

Image:Ravel 1008.2.jpg

Corinthian stater. Obverse: Pegasus with qoppa beneath, for Corinth. Reverse: Athena wearing Corinthian helmet.