Kra (letter)

Kra (Kʼ / ĸ) is a glyph formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language of Greenland and is now only found in Nunatsiavummiutut, a distinct Inuktitut dialect. It is visually similar to a Latin small capital letter K and the Greek letter kappa κ.

ĸ in a Greenlandic–Danish dictionary from 1926
"Avangnâmioĸ" in all-caps, title of Greenlandic periodical from 1957, with the uppercase of ĸ as Kʼ.

It is used to denote the sound written as [q] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (the voiceless uvular plosive). For collation purposes, it is therefore considered to be a type of q, rather than a type of k, and should sort near q.

Its Unicode code point for the lowercase form is U+0138 ĸ LATIN SMALL LETTER KRA (HTML ĸ · ĸ). If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as Kʼ, but it is not encoded separately as a single letter because it is very similar to the Latin capital letter K followed by an apostrophe,[1][2] preferably the modifier letter apostrophe, U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE (HTML ʼ).[3]

In 1973, a spelling reform replaced kra in Greenlandic with the Latin small letter q (and its capital form, with the Latin capital letter Q).[4]

Kra, small caps K (if present), and Cyrillic small к, using the fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Doulos SIL, Cambria, Linux Libertine, Andron Mega Corpus, Adobe Minion Pro, Courier New, and Consolas. Second row: italics, using the same fonts.

Notes
  1. Everson, Michael (1998-09-12). "Responses to NCITS/L2 and Unicode Consortium comments on numerous proposals" (PDF).
  2. Everson, Michael (1998-05-25). "Additional Latin characters for the UCS" (PDF).
  3. Aliprand, Joan M. (2002-04-21). "Status of Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426-2 and ISO/IEC 10646-1 (UCS)" (PDF). The capital form of the letter kra can be encoded as the sequence U+004B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K followed by U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.
  4. Everson, Michael. "Greenlandic alphabet" (PDF). Evertype. Retrieved 2009-06-23. Note that in the Greenlandic alphabet PDF from Evertype, the apostrophe-like symbol is represented by the symbol of U+2018, LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. However Michael Everson uses the shape of the right single quotation mark or modifier letter apostrophe in other documents (e.g. Everson 1998).


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.