Alphabet Letters
Kha
Ugaritic Letters
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin Attested in cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the city's destruction early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean.
Kha is the fourth sign of the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, sitting between Gimel and Daleth in the abecedary order the Ras Shamra school tablets record. It writes a voiceless fricative made far back in the throat, at the velum or uvula, the same sound the Arabic letter Kha writes and the ch of the Scottish word loch. Ugaritic preserves this consonant as a separate sign because it kept the fuller Proto-Semitic sound inventory; Hebrew merged it into Heth and so carries no separate letter for it, which is why Kha has no Hebrew cognate and no traditional name survives for it in the Northwest Semitic naming tradition at all. Arabic kept the same consonant distinct, as its own letter Kha, which this atlas records as the closer correspondence.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAttested in cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the city's destruction early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Place of OriginUgarit, modern Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Origin of the NameUgaritic's own abecedary tablets, found at Ras Shamra, fix the order of the thirty signs and, on the school copies among them, their arrangement into a teachable sequence, but no Ugaritic source assigns the signs names. Where a sign continues a Northwest Semitic consonant also written in Hebrew, this atlas carries the traditional name and pictographic sense those later alphabets preserve, understood as a scholarly projection rather than an attestation for Ugaritic itself. Signs unique to Ugaritic, and the sign added at the tail of the longer abecedaries, carry no traditional name at all. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Sense of the NameNo name-sense is attested for Ugaritic Kha: Hebrew merged this consonant into Heth and carries no separate letter for it, so Kha has no Hebrew cognate and no traditional name survives for it in the Northwest Semitic naming tradition at all. 1 Identity
Script TypeAn abjad: thirty wedge-shaped cuneiform signs record consonants, impressed in clay in the order later shared by the Hebrew and Phoenician abjads, with three of the signs dedicated to the glottal stop aleph before the vowels a, i and u. 1 PositionFourth of thirty in the Ugaritic alphabet, in the order recorded by the school abecedary tablets from Ras Shamra, the earliest attested alphabetic order known. 1 Attributions
Associated SoundA voiceless fricative made far back in the throat, at the velum or uvula, the sound the Arabic letter Kha writes and the ch of the Scottish word loch. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Ugaritic and Arabic independently preserve this Proto-Semitic consonant as its own sign; Hebrew merged the same sound into its letter Heth and carries no separate letter for it. This is a shared retention between the two scripts that kept the fuller Semitic sound inventory, not a borrowing between them and not the same correspondence as a Hebrew cognate.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.