Kako К

Kako stands twelfth, writes k, and carries the numeral 20 from Greek kappa. Its name is the Slavonic interrogative meaning how, one more ordinary word of the language pressed into service as a letter name.

The shape is the uncial kappa and it has changed very little in eleven hundred years, which makes it one of the most stable signs in the alphabet. Its numeral value opens the tens series, so it does constant work in the numbering of psalms, of the days of a month and of the chapters of a Gospel, always under a titlo.

The sound it writes was involved in one of the defining sound changes of Slavic. Before certain front vowels the inherited k had already shifted, in the prehistory of the language, to ch and to ts, which is why Slavonic has three letters where an observer might expect one, and why the alternation between them runs through the grammar of every Slavic language today. The alphabet inherited the result rather than the process, and gave each of the three outcomes its own sign.

Kako survives in every modern Cyrillic alphabet without alteration. It is also one of the letters most often used as an abbreviation mark in liturgical books, standing with a titlo for a whole word in rubrics and marginal notes, a practice that assumes a reader who already knows the text well enough to expand it.

The letters were made in a mission and the alphabet was finished in a state, and the difference between those two settings is carried by the two literary schools of the First Bulgarian Empire.

At Ohrid, in the south west of the empire, Clement and Naum, pupils of the Thessalonican brothers, ran a school that trained clergy in very large numbers and continued to work in Glagolitic, the alphabet their teachers had made. Its output was pastoral: the texts a working priest needed, in the script the mission had used.

At Preslav, the capital, a school worked under the patronage of the ruler and produced translation, compilation and original composition on a court scale. The alphabet now called Cyrillic is generally held to have been assembled here, in an environment where Greek books, Greek scribes and Greek administrative habits were close at hand, and where a script that looked Greek carried an argument about the standing of the Bulgarian church.

The relationship between the two is regularly flattened into a sequence. It was not one. The schools overlapped in time, and both scripts were in use, in some places on the same page, for generations. A late source attributes the invention of letters to Clement himself, and the claim is argued rather than accepted: it may be a memory of his work on the alphabet, or a later attempt to give the newer script the older school as a parent.

What is not in dispute is that neither school was working alone, and that Cyrillic was an institutional product rather than one person's invention.