Q is the seventeenth letter of the
basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
cue.
History
The
Semitic sound value of
Qôp (perhaps originally
qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an
Egyptian hieroglyph) was (
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 probably came to represent several
labialized velar plosives, among them and . As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to and respectively. Therefore, Qoppa was transformed into two letters: Qoppa, which stood for a number only, and
Phi Φ which stood for the aspirated sound that came to be pronounced 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.
The
Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V to represent
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, though see
Q without U. In
English this digraph most often denotes the cluster , except in borrowings from French where it represents as in
plaque. In
Italian qu represents (where is the
semivowel allophone of ); in German, ; and in
French,
Occitan,
Catalan,
Spanish and
Portuguese, or ; in the same languages
qu replaces
c for before front vowels
i and
e, since in those contexts
c is a fricative and letter 'k' is seldom used outside
loan words.)
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' is used about 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. 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.
In
Albanian,
q represents the
voiceless palatal plosive, .
In
Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, Q is used to represent the sound , which is close to English "ch" in "cheese".
In
Fijian, Q represents the
prenasalized voiced velar plosive .
In
Xhosa and
Zulu, Q represents the
postalveolar click .
In
Kiowa, Q represents a glottalized velar plosive, .
Q, which is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it in English, is the second most rarely used letter in the
English language. The Q represents a voiceless velar plosive, contrary to the belief that it represents a labialized voiceless velar plosive. If this were the case, there would be no need for the "U" at the end.
thumb|rightThe 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 usually handwritten finishing with a rightward swash to distinguish from the leftward facing curved descender on the lowercase G.
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
