Kaaf ࠊ

Kaaf is the eleventh letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value twenty, the second of the tens after yut. It writes a plain k. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew kaf, glossed as the palm of the hand, a reading argued backwards from the word rather than attested.

Kaaf is the third of the single letter prepositions that attach to the front of a word, after bit and labat: it means like or as, and it is the letter that makes a comparison. Suffixed instead of prefixed it marks the second person possessive. Between those two jobs it appears constantly, and in a script with no final forms it appears in the same shape whichever end of the word it is on, which is not true of its Hebrew counterpart.

Greek took the sign as kappa and kept its sound and its position. Latin took kappa from Greek but used it sparingly, preferring C for the k sound, which is why K is an uncommon letter in Latin and in several of the languages that took the Latin alphabet from it. That is a change of fashion in one alphabet rather than a change in the sign, which has written a k in the Semitic scripts without interruption throughout.

The character is encoded at U+080A.

The square Hebrew script writes five of its letters differently at the end of a word: kaf, mem, nun, pe and tsade each have a final form. Samaritan has none, and a reader coming from Hebrew usually assumes something has been dropped. Nothing has. The finals are an innovation of the script Hebrew adopted, not an inheritance the Samaritans lost.

The sequence of events is this. Paleo-Hebrew, the Israelite script, had one shape per letter. After the Babylonian exile Jewish scribes took up the Aramaic script for writing Hebrew, and it was inside that script, as it was written in ink with a reed rather than cut in stone, that certain letters developed a long descending tail when nothing followed them on the line. Over time the two shapes were standardised as separate forms and the distinction became part of the alphabet. The Samaritan community never made that switch. Its script continued the Paleo-Hebrew line directly, so the conditions that produced the finals never arose in it.

This is the clearest single test of the relationship between the two scripts, and it settles the question people most often get backwards. If Samaritan were a decorative variant of the square letters it would have inherited the finals, because they are part of what the square script is. It does not have them because it is not downstream of the square script at all. The two are branches from one root, and this is the branch that did not change.