Kra (letter)
{{Short description|Letter used in an Inuktitut dialect}}
{{Redirect-distinguish|ĸ|к}}{{Infobox grapheme
| letter = Kʼ ĸ
| type = alphabet
| typedesc = ic
| language = Inuttitut
}}
File:ĸra_in_a_dictionary_(ubt).JPG
Kra (uppercase: Kʼ, lowercase: 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 {{IPA|[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 {{unichar|0138|LATIN SMALL LETTER KRA|html=}}. If this is unavailable, q is substituted. The letter can be capitalized as Kʼ, 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,{{cite web |last1=Everson |first1=Michael |date=1998-09-12 |title=Responses to NCITS/L2 and Unicode Consortium comments on numerous proposals |url=http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1741.pdf}}{{cite web |last1=Everson |first1=Michael |date=1998-05-25 |title=Additional Latin characters for the UCS |url=http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1741.pdf}} preferably the modifier letter apostrophe, {{unichar|02BC|modifier letter apostrophe|html=}}.{{cite web |last1=Aliprand |first1=Joan M. |date=2002-04-21 |title=Status of Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426-2 and ISO/IEC 10646-1 (UCS) |url=https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02150-ja-5426pt2.pdf |access-date= |website= |publisher= |format=PDF |quote=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.}} However, this case mapping is not implemented in Unicode.
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).{{cite web |last1=Everson |first1=Michael |title=Greenlandic alphabet |url=http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/greenlandic.pdf |accessdate=2009-06-23 |publisher=Evertype |format=PDF}} 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).
File:Kra-and-smallcap-k-and-Cyrillic-k-in-different-fonts.svg K (if present), and Cyrillic small к, using the fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Doulos SIL, Cambria, Linux Libertine, Andron Mega Corpus, Adobe Minion Pro, Courier New, and Consolas. Second row: italics, using the same fonts.]]
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