Q
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| Basic Latin alphabet | |||||
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | ||
| Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | ||
| Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn |
| Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | |
| Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz |
Q (
/ˈkjuː/; named cue)[1] is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.
Contents |
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph wj |
Phoenician qoph |
Etruscan Q | Greek Qoppa |
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The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was /q/ (voiceless uvular plosive), a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones. In Greek, this sign as Qoppa Ϙ probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ respectively. Therefore, Qoppa was transformed into two letters: Qoppa, which stood for a number only, and Phi Φ which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek.
In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel (e.g. "EQO" = ego), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.[2]
The Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/
Usage
In most modern western languages written in Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, ‹q› appears almost exclusively in the digraph ‹qu› (e.g. quick, quit, quack), though see Q without U.
- In English this digraph most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in plaque. Q is the second most rarely used letter in the English language.
- In Italian ‹qu› represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the semivowel allophone of /u/)
- In Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, ‹qu› represents /k/ or /kw/; ‹qu› replaces ‹c› for /k/ before front vowels ‹i› and ‹e›, since in those contexts ‹c› is a fricative and letter ‹k› is seldom used outside loan words.
- In German, ‹qu› represents /kv/
- Danish abolished the letter in 1872, although it's still part of the alphabet. A consequence of this was the change in spelling of the word kvinde (woman), which prior to 1872 was spelt Quinde. As a result the term kvinde med q (woman spelt with q) is used for an old-fashioned woman, whilst kvinde med k refers to a modern woman.
In the Aymara, Aleut, Yup'ik, Inuit, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, as well as romanised Arabic, ‹q› is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] is also used in the IPA for the voiceless uvular plosive, as well as in most transliteration schemes of Semitic languages for the "emphatic" qōp sound. The sound is rendered with letter ﻕ in Arabic script.
In Maltese and Võro, ‹q› denotes the glottal stop, [ʔ].
In Albanian, ‹q› represents the voiceless palatal plosive, /c/.
In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, ‹q› is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English ‹ch› in "cheese".
In Fijian, ‹q› represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ].
In Xhosa and Zulu, ‹q› represents the postalveolar click [kǃ].
In Kiowa, ‹q› represents a glottalized velar plosive, /kʼ/.
The lowercase Q is usually seen as a lowercase O with a descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish). The lowercase Q's descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the lowercase G (a loop) and lowercase Q (vertical). The descender of the lowercase Q is sometimes handwritten finishing with a rightward swash to distinguish from the leftward facing curved descender on the lowercase G.
In physics, Q is used to denote electric charge.
Codes for computing
In Unicode, the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lower case q is U+0071.
The ASCII hexadecimal codes for capital Q and lowercase q are 51 and 71, respectively. These equal 81 and 113 in decimal, and 01010001 and 01110001 in binary.
The EBCDIC code for capital Q is 216 and for lowercase q is 152.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "Q" and "q" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
- List of English words containing Q not followed by U
- Q with stroke
- Q with hook
- Q with hook tail
- Ќ
- Қ
- Mind your Ps and Qs
- Q (Star Trek)
- Q (source) the hypothetical source for the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke
References
- ↑ "Q" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "que," op. cit.
- ↑ Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (illustrated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 21. ISBN 0195083458. http://books.google.com/books?id=IeHmqKY2BqoC.
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
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Letter Q with diacritics
ɊɋƢƣʠ
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
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