From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The letter Q is the seventeenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is cue, occasionally spelled cu (both pronounced /kju/).
[edit] History
| Egyptian hieroglyph wj |
Phoenician Q |
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. The Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/.
In most modern western languages written in Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, Q appears almost exclusively in the digraph QU, 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. In Italian qu represents [kw] (where [w] is an allophone of /u/); in German, /kv/; and in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Spanish, and Catalan, /k/. (In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan and French, 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 the Aymara, Azeri, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] is also used in IPA for the voiceless uvular plosive, as well as in most transliteration schemes of Semitic languages for the "emphatic" qōp sound.
In Maltese and Võro, Q denotes the glottal stop.
In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, Q is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English "ch" in "cheese". In Albanian it denotes the voiceless palatal stop [c]
Q is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it, thus making it the second most rarely used letter in the English Language
The lowercase Q is usually written as a lowercase O with a line below it, with or without a "tail". It is usually typed without due to the major difference between the tails of the lowercase G and lowercase Q. It is usually written with the tail to distinguish from the G. Unlike the written lowercase G, which has a leftward facing tail, the Q's tail faces right. An example of the lowercase Q written from a keyboard is a "q".
[edit] Meanings of Q
- See Q (disambiguation).
[edit] Trivia
- Q is the only letter that does not appear in any US state name
- People connected to an IRC-network with usermode +q are immune to bans, kicks and akicks.
[edit] See also
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