Q
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| ISO basic Latin alphabet |
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| AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz |
Q (/[invalid input: 'icon']ˈkjuː/; named cue[1]) is the seventeenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
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 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 alphabet. In script written English, the capital Q is very close in appearance to a 2, and many people use the print Q instead.
- 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 languages 'c' represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels.
- In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, ⟨q⟩ is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English ⟨ch⟩ in "cheese", but pronounced further toward the front of the mouth.
- In Fijian, ⟨q⟩ represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ].
- In Greenlandic, Quechua and Aymara,
represents the voiceless uvular plosive [q].
- In Azeri, ⟨q⟩ represents the voiced velar plosive [ɡ].
- In Uyghur (Latin script), ⟨q⟩ represents the voiceless uvular plosive [q].
- In Xhosa and Zulu, ⟨q⟩ represents the postalveolar click [kǃ].
- In Kiowa, ⟨q⟩ represents a glottalized velar plosive [kʼ].
- In Võro and Maltese, ⟨q⟩ represents the glottal stop [ʔ].
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), even a reversed lowercase p. 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.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Q̵ q̵ : Latin letter Q with stroke
- ʠ : Latin letter Q with hook
- Ɋ ɋ : Latin letter Q with hook tail
- Ԛ ԛ : Cyrillic letter Qa
- Ќ, ќ : Cyrillic letter Kje
- Қ қ : Cyrillic letter Ka with descender
Computing codes
| character | Q | q | ||
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q | LATIN SMALL LETTER Q | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 81 | 0051 | 113 | 0071 |
| UTF-8 | 81 | 51 | 113 | 71 |
| Numeric character reference | Q | Q | q | q |
| ASCII 1 | 81 | 51 | 113 | 71 |
| EBCDIC family | 216 | D8 | 152 | 98 |
1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
| NATO phonetic | Morse code |
| Quebec |
See also
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. p. 21. ISBN 0195083458.
