Kra (letter) explained

Kra (Kʼ / ĸ) is a glyph formerly used to write the Kalaallisut language (also known as Greenlandic) of Greenland and is now only found in Inuttitut, a distinct Inuktitut dialect. It is visually similar to a Latin small capital letter K, a Greek letter Kappa: κ, or a Cyrillic small letter Ka: к.

It is used to denote the sound written as pronounced 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 . If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as , 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, .[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]

Notes

  1. Web site: Responses to NCITS/L2 and Unicode Consortium comments on numerous proposals . Everson. Michael . 1998-09-12.
  2. Web site: Additional Latin characters for the UCS. Everson. Michael. 1998-05-25.
  3. Web site: Status of Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426-2 and ISO/IEC 10646-1 (UCS) . Aliprand . Joan M. . 2002-04-21 . 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. Web site: Greenlandic alphabet. Everson. Michael. Evertype. PDF. 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).