Koppa Information
Koppa (Ҁ, ҁ; Russian: Коппа) is an archaic numeral character of oldest Cyrillic manuscripts, representing value 90. The character has been borrowed from the archaic Greek letter Qoppa with the same meaning (in Greek, at least, qoppa seems always to have been a redundant letter, by classical times being used solely as a numeral indicating 90). Thus, Cyrillic koppa probably never had a phonetic value and was never used as a letter of any national language using Cyrillic. However, certain modern textbooks and dictionaries of Old Church Slavonic language mention this character among other letters of the Cyrillic alphabet (typically between П and Р, to reproduce the Greek alphabetical order).
Cyrillic koppa was replaced relatively early by the letter Ч, which is similar in appearance and originally had no numeric value. Isolated examples of Ч used as a numeral are found in the East and South Slavonic areas as early as the eleventh century, though koppa continued in regular use into the fourteenth. In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, however, koppa was retained, and Ч used with the value 60, replacing Ѯ.
References
- Старославянский словарь (по рукописям X—XI веков), под редакцией Р. М. Цейтлин, Р. Вечерки и Э. Благовой, Москва, “Русский язык”, 1994, ISBN 5-200-01113-2 (an Old Slavonic dictionary compiled by manuscripts of 10-11 c.).
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