What ⲫ means
It is a lowercase letter used inside Coptic words.
Coptic writing adapted Greek letters to spell Egyptian. Early Coptic scripts were developing by the 1st century CE at latest; the standard Coptic alphabet emerged in the 3rd century CE. Texts include glosses, rituals, astrology, labels, Christian writing and private documents.
The Coptic alphabet adapted Greek phi; ⲫ has its own Coptic identity, separate from Greek φ. Coptic has varieties such as Bohairic and Sahidic. Bohairic uses ⲫ for a p with a puff of air before a stressed vowel. Sahidic usually writes ⲡ there and rarely uses ⲫ for the sequence ⲡϩ, Coptic pi followed by hori.
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Who writes ⲫ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ⲫ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Coptic block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
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Collections with ⲫ
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How to type or find ⲫ
- Also called
- Coptic phi · phi
- Search it as
- Coptic fi · Greek phi · Bohairic · Sahidic · Coptic keyboard
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ⲫ\2CABCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.