К, the letter ka

History

К, named ka, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiceless velar plosive /k/, the sound written k in king or in kick. Beyond that sound value, the article for this letter records nothing about its shape, its variants or its history.

Russian cursive, the handwritten form of the modern Russian alphabet, was developed during the 18th century on the base of the earlier Cyrillic tachygraphic writing known as skoropis, meaning rapid or running script. Skoropis in turn was the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav, and Russian cursive became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books.

Skoropis is what a reader meets in older office papers. It developed from semi-ustav in the second half of the 14th century, was used in particular in offices and in private office work, and is marked by a pronounced calligraphic character: roundness of letters, smoothness of writing, a large number of strokes, ligatures and abbreviations, small lowercase with long expressive elements, and large capitals. Set against semi-ustav it shows word abbreviations, letters reaching the top of the line, omission of etymological final ъ and ь, an overall simplification of spelling, and variation of letter shapes depending on their neighbourhood.

One consequence matters for anyone reading a document rather than a chart. Each scribe had his own handwriting and his own peculiarities in forming and grouping letters, so correct reading means comparing vague places with parts of the same text already read, a skill acquired mainly from practice. The unification of letter shapes in office and school across the 18th and 19th centuries is what produced today's handwriting in the 19th century.