Ka (Cyrillic)

Ka (К к; italics: К к) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiceless velar plosive /k/, like the pronunciation of ⟨k⟩ in "king".

History

The Cyrillic letter Ka was derived from the Greek letter Kappa (Κ κ).

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was како (kako), meaning "as".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Ka had a value of 20.

Form

The Cyrillic letter Ka looks very similar, and corresponds to the Latin letter K but, as with most Cyrillic letters, the lowercase form is simply a smaller version of the uppercase. Cyrillic Ka is generally differentiated from its Latin and Greek counterparts by drawing its diagonal spurs with curves instead of straight lines.

Usage

In Russian, the letter Ka represents the plain voiceless velar plosive /k/ or the palatalized one /kʲ/; for example, the word короткий ("short") contains both the kinds: [kɐˈrotkʲɪj]. The palatalized variant is pronounced when the following letter in the word is ь, е, ё, и, ю, or я.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Κ κ/ϰ : Greek letter Kappa
• K k : Latin letter K

Computing codes

character	К		к
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER KA		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER KA
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	1050	041A	1082	043A
UTF-8	208 154	D0 9A	208 186	D0 BA
Numeric character reference	К	К	к	к
KOI8-R and KOI8-U	235	EB	203	CB
Code page 855	199	C7	198	C6
Code page 866	138	8A	170	AA
Windows-1251	202	CA	234	EA
ISO-8859-5	186	BA	218	DA
Macintosh Cyrillic	138	8A	234	EA

External links

• The Wiktionary entry for К
• The Wiktionary entry for к