Kappa ⲕ

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.

Because the alphabet is also the numeral system, letters like kappa spend as much of their working life as figures as they do as sounds, and nowhere more than in the Coptic calendar. The Coptic year has twelve months of thirty days with a short thirteenth period of five or six days at the end, an arrangement descended directly from the ancient Egyptian civil calendar and regularised under Roman administration. Its years are counted in the era of the martyrs, which begins with the accession of the emperor Diocletian, whose persecution the Coptic Orthodox Church remembers as the heaviest it suffered. That reckoning is still used in the church, so a Coptic liturgical book prints dates that no other calendar in daily use anywhere shares.

Writing those dates means writing letters as numbers, and a month of thirty days means the twenties are in constant use. Kappa heads them. The same numerals date colophons, the notes scribes wrote at the end of a manuscript recording who copied it, when, and often for whom, which are among the most valuable single lines in any Coptic codex. A colophon fixes a manuscript in time and place, and a scholar reading one is reading the alphabet in its numerical rather than its phonetic function, letter by letter, exactly as the scribe intended.