Kaph ܟ

Kaph is the eleventh letter of the Syriac abjad and the first of the tens, with the numeral value twenty. It writes k and is one of the six letters with hard and soft readings; soft kaph is the voiceless velar fricative heard in the Scottish pronunciation of loch.

It joins on both sides and changes shape markedly at the end of a word, where in the Serto hand it drops a long tail below the line. Syriac has no separate final letters of the kind Hebrew developed; what it has is positional forms, so a final kaph is the same letter drawn as the last member of a connected run rather than a different character.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for the palm of the hand, a gloss that describes a sign of the older linear alphabet and no longer describes anything in the Syriac form.

Kaph carries a good deal of grammar. It writes the second person pronominal suffix, the your or you attached to the end of a noun or a verb, so a reader meets it at the close of a word constantly, in exactly the position where its long tailed form appears. That combination, a very common grammatical ending written by a letter with a conspicuous final shape, makes kaph one of the easiest letters to pick out of a page of Serto at a glance.

Syriac letters double as figures. The first nine letters carry one to nine, the next nine carry twenty to ninety, and the last four carry one hundred to four hundred. Kaph is where the second run begins, so it is the letter a scribe reaches for at twenty and the start of the whole middle stretch of any long number.

The system is inherited along with the alphabet and works the same way in Hebrew and, through the abjad order, in Arabic. Its practical use in Syriac manuscripts is thorough. Scribes number leaves and quires with it, which is how a codex that has lost its binding can be reassembled in the right order, and how a missing quire can be identified as missing rather than merely suspected. Dates, chapter numbers and marginal references use it too.

Figures beyond four hundred, which taw supplies, are written by combining letters or by marking a letter to multiply its value. A mark written below a letter can raise it in this way, so a scribe is not confined to what twenty-two letters can express on their own.

For a reader the system has one awkward property: a string of letters may be a word or a number, and the difference is signalled by marks that are not always present. In practice context settles it almost every time, and where it does not, an editor makes a choice and a careful edition says so.