Qoph is the nineteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician qōp 𐤒, Hebrew alphabet qūp̄ , Aramaic alphabet qop 𐡒, Syriac alphabet qōp̄ ܩ, and Arabic script qāf . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪄, South Arabian 𐩤, and Ge'ez ቀ.
Its original sound value was a West Semitic emphatic stop, presumably . In Hebrew numerals, it has the numerical value of 100.
Origins
The origin of the glyph shape of
qōp () is uncertain. It is usually suggested to have originally depicted either a
sewing needle, specifically the eye of a needle (Hebrew קוף
quf and Aramaic קופא
qopɑʔ both refer to the eye of a needle), or the back of a head and neck (
qāf in Arabic meant "
nape").
[
Travers Wood, Henry Craven Ord Lanchester, A Hebrew Grammar, 1913, p. 7.
A. B. Davidson, Hebrew Primer and Grammar, 2000, p. 4.
The meaning is doubtful. "Eye of a needle" has been suggested, and also "knot" Harvard Studies in Classical Philology vol. 45.]
According to an older suggestion, it may also have been a picture of a monkey and its tail (the Hebrew קוף means "monkey").
[
Isaac Taylor, History of the Alphabet: Semitic Alphabets, Part 1, 2003, p. 174:
"The old explanation, which has again been revived by Halévy, is that it denotes an 'ape,' the character Q being taken to represent an ape with its tail hanging down. It may also be referred to a Talmudic root which would signify an 'aperture' of some kind, as the 'eye of a needle,' ... Lenormant adopts the more usual explanation that the word means a 'knot'.]
Besides Aramaic alphabet Qop, which gave rise to the letter in the Semitic abjads used in classical antiquity,
Phoenician qōp is also the origin of the Latin letter Q and Greek Ϙ ( qoppa) and Φ ( phi).[
Qop may have been assigned the sound value /kʷʰ/ in early Greek; as this was allophonic with /pʰ/ in certain contexts and certain dialects, the letter qoppa continued as the letter phi. C. Brixhe, "History of the Alpbabet", in Christidēs, Arapopoulou, & Chritē, eds., 2007, A History of Ancient Greek.]
Arabic qāf
The Arabic letter ق is named قاف
. It is written in several ways depending in its position in the word:
Traditionally in the Maghrebi script it is written with a single dot, similarly to how the letter fā ف is written in Mashreqi scripts:
It is usually transliterated into Latin script as q, though some scholarly works use ḳ.[ e.g., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition]
Pronunciation
According to
Sibawayh, author of the first book on
Arabic grammar, the letter is pronounced
voiced phoneme (
maǧhūr),
[Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language, pg. 131. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Paperback edition. ] although some scholars argue, that Sibawayh's term
maǧhūr implies lack of aspiration rather than voice.
As noted above, Modern Standard Arabic has the voiceless uvular plosive as its standard pronunciation of the letter, but dialectal pronunciations vary as follows:
The three main pronunciations:
-
: in most of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, Southern and Tihamiyya Arabic Yemen and parts of Oman, Northern Iraq, parts of the Levant (especially the Alawite and Druze dialects). In fact, it is so characteristic of the and the Druze that Levantines invented a verb "yqaqi" /jqæqi/ that means "speaking with a /q/".
-
: in most of the Arabian Peninsula, Northern and Hadhrami Arabic Yemen and parts of Oman, Southern Iraq, some parts within Jordan, eastern Syria and southern Palestine, Upper Egypt ( Ṣaʿīd), Sudan, Libya, Mauritania and to lesser extent in some parts of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco but it is also used partially across those countries in some words.
[This variance has led to the confusion over the spelling of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi's name in Latin letters. In Western Arabic dialects the sound is more preserved but can also be sometimes pronounced or as a simple under Berber languages and French language influence.]
-
: in most of the Levant and Lower Egypt, as well as some North African towns such as Tlemcen and Fez.
Other pronunciations:
-
: In Sudanese Arabic and some forms of Yemeni Arabic, even in loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic or when speaking Modern Standard Arabic.
-
: In rural Palestinian it is often pronounced as a voiceless velar plosive , even in loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic or when speaking Modern Standard Arabic.
Marginal pronunciations:
-
: In some positions in Najdi Arabic, though this pronunciation is fading in favor of .
-
: Optionally in Iraqi Arabic and in Gulf Arabic, it is sometimes pronounced as a voiced postalveolar affricate , even in loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic or when speaking Modern Standard Arabic.
-
~ : in Sudanese Arabic and some Yemeni dialects (Yemeni Arabic), and sometimes in Gulf Arabic by Persian influence, even in loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic or when speaking Modern Standard Arabic.
Velar gāf
It is not well known when the pronunciation of qāf as a velar occurred or the probability of it being connected to the pronunciation of
Gimel as an affricate , but the Arabian peninsula, there are two sets of pronunciations, either the represents a and represents a
which is the main pronunciation in most of the peninsula except for western and southern
Yemeni Arabic and parts of
Omani Arabic where represents a and represents a .
The Standard Arabic (MSA) combination of as a and as a does not occur in any natural modern dialect in the Arabian peninsula, which shows a strong correlation between the palatalization of to and the pronunciation of the as a as shown in the table below:
Pronunciation across other languages
| +
!Language
!Dialect(s) / Script(s)
!Pronunciation (IPA) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Maghrebi variant
The
Maghrebi script of writing
is different: having only a single point (dot) above; when the letter is isolated or word-final, it may sometimes become unpointed.[ p. 38 shows ] with a superscript point in all four positions.
| + The Maghrebi | Position in word:
!Isolated
!Final
!Medial
!Initial |
| Form of letter: |
|
| | |
The earliest Arabic manuscripts show in several variants: pointed (above or below) or unpointed.
Within Maghribi texts, there is no possibility of confusing it with the letter , as it is instead written with a dot underneath () in the Maghribi script.[Muhammad Ghoniem, M S M Saifullah, cAbd ar-Rahmân Robert Squires & cAbdus Samad, Are There Scribal Errors In The Qur'ân?, see ] on a traffic sign written which is written elsewhere as قف, Retrieved 2011-August-27
Hebrew qof
The
Oxford Hebrew-English Dictionary transliterates the letter Qoph () as
or ; and, when word-final, it may be transliterated as
.
The English spellings of Biblical names (as derived via
Vulgate from
LXX) containing this letter may represent it as
c or
k, e.g.
Cain for Hebrew
Qayin, or
Kenan for
Qenan (Genesis 4:1, 5:9).
Pronunciation
In
Hebrew language the letter is also called
. The letter represents ; i.e., no distinction is made between the pronunciations of Qof and
Kaph (in modern Hebrew).
However, many historical groups have made that distinction, with Qof being pronounced by Iraqi Jews and other Mizrahi Jews, or even as by Yemenite Jews influenced by Yemeni Arabic.
Qoph is consistently transliterated into classical Greek with the unaspirated〈κ〉/k/, while Kaph (both its allophones) is transliterated with the aspirated〈χ〉/kʰ/. Thus Qoph was unaspirated /k/ where Kaph was /kʰ/, this distinction is no longer present. Further we know that Qoph is one of the emphatic consonants through comparison with other Semitic languages, and most likely was ejective /kʼ/. In Arabic the emphatics are pharyngealised and this causes a preference for back vowels, this is not shown in Hebrew orthography. Though the gutturals show a preference for certain vowels, Hebrew emphatics do not in Tiberian Hebrew (the Hebrew dialect recorded with vowels) and therefore were most likely not pharyngealised, but ejective, pharyngealisation being a result of Arabisation.
Numeral
Qof in
Hebrew numerals represents the number 100.
Sarah is described in
Genesis Rabba as , literally "At Qof years of age, she was like
Kaph years of age in sin", meaning that when she was 100 years old, she was as sinless as when she was 20.
Syriac qop
Unicode
External links
