Qoph (Phoenician Qōp ) is the nineteenth letter of the Semitic scripts. Aramaic Qop is derived from the Phoenician letter, and derivations from Aramaic include Hebrew Qof , Syriac Qōp̄ ܩ and Arabic . Its original sound value was a West Semitic emphatic stop, presumably . In Hebrew numerals, it has the numerical value of 100. Origins The origin of the glyph shape of qōp () is uncertain. It is usually suggested to have originally depicted either a sewing needle, specifically the eye of a needle (Hebrew and Aramaic both refer to the eye of a needle), or the back of a head and neck (qāf in Arabic meant "nape"). According to an older suggestion, it may also have been a picture of a monkey and its tail (the Hebrew means "monkey"). Besides Aramaic Qop, which gave rise to the letter in the Semitic abjads used in classical antiquity, Phoenician qōp is also the origin of the Latin letter Q and Greek Ϙ (qoppa) and Φ (phi). Hebrew Qof The Oxford Hebrew-English Dictionary transliterates the letter Qoph () as or ; and, when word-final, it may be transliterated as . The English spellings of Biblical names (as derived from Latin via Biblical Greek) containing this letter may represent it as c or k, e.g. Cain for Hebrew Qayin, or Kenan for Qena'an (Genesis 4:1, 5:9). Pronunciation In modern Israeli Hebrew the letter is also called . The letter represents ; i.e., no distinction is made between the pronunciations of Qof and Kaph (in modern Hebrew). However, many historical groups have made that distinction, with Qof being pronounced by Iraqi Jews and other Mizrahim, or even as by Yemenite Jews under the influence of Yemeni Arabic. Qoph is consistently transliterated into classical Greek with the unaspirated〈κ〉/k/, while Kaph (both its allophones) is transliterated with the aspirated〈χ〉/kʰ/. Thus Qoph was unaspirated /k/ where Kaph was /kʰ/, this distinction is no longer present. Further we know that Qoph is one of the emphatic consonants through comparison with other Semitic languages, and most likely was ejective /kʼ/. In Arabic the emphatics are pharyngealised and this causes a preference for back vowels, this is not shown in Hebrew orthography. Though the gutturals show a preference for certain vowels, Hebrew emphatics do not in Tiberian Hebrew (the Hebrew dialect recorded with vowels) and therefore were most likely not pharyngealised, but ejective, pharyngealisation being a result of