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Quf: The Samaritan Letter That Became Q

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Quf: The Samaritan Letter That Became Q

Quf is the nineteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and the first of the hundreds, carrying the numeral value one hundred. It stands for a consonant the older language kept distinct from plain k, made further back in the mouth, and it is the third member of the emphatic series after tit and tsaadiy. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew qof.

Its afterlife in the European alphabets is the most direct of any letter in the sequence. Greek took the sign as qoppa, in this same nineteenth position. The distinction between qoppa and kappa made no difference in Greek, so the letter fell out of use in Greek writing and survived only as a numeral sign in the alphabetic numbering. Before it disappeared, the Etruscans and then the Romans had taken it, and it is the Latin letter Q. So a letter that Greek discarded because it had no use for the sound is still in daily use across the Latin alphabet, and the Samaritan script and the English one hold the same sign at the same point in the same list.

Between quf and the end of the alphabet there are only three letters, which is why the twenty-two letter numeral system runs nine units, nine tens and four hundreds, and has to build anything above four hundred by combination.

The character is encoded at U+0812.

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