Koppa
Encyclopedia
Koppa is an archaic letter-like numeral character of the Cyrillic writing system
. Its form (and modern name) are derived from the Greek letter Koppa .
Koppa was used as a numeral character in oldest Cyrillic manuscripts, representing value 90 (exactly as its Greek origin did). It was replaced relatively early by the Cyrillic letter Che
(Ч ч), which is similar in appearance and originally had no numeric value. Isolated examples of Ч used as a numeral are found in the East and South Slavonic areas as early as the eleventh century, though Koppa continued in regular use into the fourteenth century. In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, however, Koppa was retained, and Ч used with the value 60, replacing the Cyrillic letter Ksi in 1600.
Cyrillic Koppa never had a phonetic value and was never used as a letter of any national language using Cyrillic. However, certain modern textbooks and dictionaries of Old Church Slavonic language insert this character among other letters of the early Cyrillic alphabet
(either between П and Р, to reproduce the Greek alphabetical order, or at the very end of the list).
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
. Its form (and modern name) are derived from the Greek letter Koppa .
Koppa was used as a numeral character in oldest Cyrillic manuscripts, representing value 90 (exactly as its Greek origin did). It was replaced relatively early by the Cyrillic letter Che
Che (Cyrillic)
Che or Cha is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate , like the pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in "change"....
(Ч ч), which is similar in appearance and originally had no numeric value. Isolated examples of Ч used as a numeral are found in the East and South Slavonic areas as early as the eleventh century, though Koppa continued in regular use into the fourteenth century. In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, however, Koppa was retained, and Ч used with the value 60, replacing the Cyrillic letter Ksi in 1600.
Cyrillic Koppa never had a phonetic value and was never used as a letter of any national language using Cyrillic. However, certain modern textbooks and dictionaries of Old Church Slavonic language insert this character among other letters of the early Cyrillic alphabet
Early Cyrillic alphabet
The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...
(either between П and Р, to reproduce the Greek alphabetical order, or at the very end of the list).
Computing codes
| character | ||||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER KOPPA | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER KOPPA | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1152 | 0480 | 1153 | 0481 |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
210 128 | D2 80 | 210 129 | D2 81 |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Ҁ | Ҁ | ҁ | ҁ |
Further reading
- Старославянский словарь (по рукописям X—XI веков), под редакцией Р. М. Цейтлин, Р. Вечерки и Э. Благовой, Москва, “Русский язык”, 1994, ISBN 5-200-01113-2 (an Old Slavonic dictionary compiled by manuscripts of 10-11 c.).
- Lunt, Horace G. Old Church Slavonic grammar. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001 (7th ed.), ISBN 3-11-016284-9.