Koppa (letter)

In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced [q]; in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for /k/ before back vowels Ο, Υ and Ω.

[1] The koppa was used as a symbol for the city of Corinth, which was originally spelled Ϙόρινθος Qórinthos in Doric Greek.

These are also the shapes in which it was borrowed into the early Cyrillic alphabet (Ҁ), as well as into Gothic (), in both cases with the same numeric function.

Similarly, in the Coptic script, the identical-looking sign ϥ is also used as a numeral for 90, although as an alphabetic letter it has an unrelated sound value, /f/, derived from Egyptian demotic.

[3] The Unicode character encoding standard originally (since version 1.1 of 1993), had only a single code point for Koppa, which was marked as uppercase and could be used either for an epigraphic or a numeral glyph, depending on font design.

[6] A serifed version similar to his koppa was adopted as the reference glyph for the Unicode code charts, along with a lowercase form with heavy curved arms and pointed angles: .

Corinthian stater . Obverse: Pegasus with koppa beneath, for Corinth. Reverse: Athena wearing a Corinthian helmet .
Corinthian hemiobol . Obverse: Pegasus with koppa beneath, for Corinth. Reverse: Aphrodite wearing a sakkos headband.
Greek alphabets of Petrie's Naukratis I with qoppa
Example of a 19th-century font using S-shaped capital Stigma (first row) and G-shaped capital Koppa next to Sampi (second row) .
Example of a 19th-century font using turned-lamedh-shaped capital Koppa and G-shaped capital Stigma. (Translation: Psalm 96)
Stigma and Koppa in modern fonts. Just as in historical typesetting practice, some versions of Stigma may be indistinguishable from some versions of Koppa.