Qaf, and What an Emphatic Consonant Actually Is

Qaf writes a k released with a closed glottis, an ejective, and it continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew qoph, the Syriac qaph and the Arabic qaf. The name is close to unchanged across all four alphabets.

The interesting question is what the sound originally was. Semitic grammar describes a class of consonants as emphatic, but the word is a label for a correspondence rather than a description of a sound, because the class is realised quite differently in different branches. In Arabic the emphatics are pharyngealised, made with the back of the tongue drawn towards the throat. In the Ethiopian Semitic languages they are ejectives, made by closing the glottis and compressing the air above it. In Hebrew as it is now read the distinction has gone entirely.

A good deal of comparative work has argued that the ejective realisation is the older one, on the grounds that the Ethiopian languages sit beside Cushitic languages with the same feature, and that a shift from ejective to pharyngealised is easier to motivate than the reverse. The atlas does not adjudicate the reconstruction. It records that qaf is an ejective in Ge'ez, that its Arabic cognate is not, and that the shared label emphatic conceals that difference rather than explaining it.