K (Cyrillic)

K , k (name: ka ) - the letter of all Slavic Cyrillic alphabets (11th in Bulgarian , 12th in Russian , Belarusian and Serbian , 13th in Macedonian and 15th in Ukrainian ); it is also used in the scripts of some non-Slavic peoples, where numerous new letters, such as Ҡ , Қ , Ӄ , Ҟ or Ҝ, were even built on its basis. In the Old and Church Slavonic alphabet it is called “kako” (senior Christian) or “kak” (Central Christian), which means “how”. In Cyrillic it is the 12th in a row, it looks like and has a numerical value of 20; 13th in the Glagolitic account, looks like and has a numerical value of 40. The origin of the Cyrillic letter is Greek kappa (Κ, κ) ; either the kappa or the Semitic writing is brought up to the glagolic one: in some handwritings, its similarity with the Hebrew letter “kof” (ק) is obvious.

In medieval handwriting, the lowercase letter k was often depicted indistinguishable from a couple of ss (which, probably, to avoid confusion led to the spelling rule, which was observed until 1917 - 1918 , not to replace before the prefix from -, maybe - , is-, , ras- , contrary to pronunciation and ancient spelling). The SS-shaped inscription of the letter k is also found in printed books - a striking example is the font used to compose the “ Lithuanian Statute ” in 1588 (see [1] - this font was used at the bottom of the page). The combination ck looked like a triple ccc , and the letter ksi ( Ѯ ) was used for cc .

In a civilian font, the shape of the capital Cyrillic letter K was close to Latin, but they did not begin to build the lowercase according to the Latin pattern ( k ), preserving the tradition of drawing it as a reduced capital letter. However, in many fonts, subtle differences between Greek, Latin and Cyrillic capital letters K are still traditionally preserved: the first is a line from the center of which two more lines come; in Latin, at first one line goes up and already from it a second goes down; in the Cyrillic version, the lower part is rounded and already a second line is drawn from it, which has a drop-shaped stroke at the end.