Kappa: The Coptic Letter (Value 20), from Greek Kappa

Kappa is the eleventh letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value twenty. Unlike gamma, delta and zeta, which came into Coptic with the Greek alphabet and found little native employment, kappa had a great deal to do. Egyptian possessed a k sound and had written it in every earlier stage of the script, so kappa passed straight into service in words of Egyptian stock, and it does equally heavy duty in the Greek vocabulary that entered the language with Christianity. On a page of Coptic scripture it will be one of the more frequent consonants. Kappa also appears in a feature of Coptic writing taken over wholesale from Greek Christian book practice, the contracted sacred names known as nomina sacra.

In these a word such as Christ, God, Jesus or spirit is written as its first and last letters with a stroke drawn above, so that the reader recognises the word without it being spelled out. The habit began in Greek Christian manuscripts and travelled with the scriptures into Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Latin alike. In Coptic it sits alongside the superlinear stroke used for syllabic consonants, and a reader has to tell the two uses of a very similar mark apart from context, which is one of the ordinary difficulties of reading an early Coptic hand.