Q

Q is the seventeenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled cue (pronEng|kjuː). ["Q" "Oxford English Dictionary," 2nd edition (1989); "Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged" (1993); "que," op. cit.]

History

The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally "qaw" cord of wool, and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was IPA|/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 Unicode|Ϙ probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them IPA|/kʷ/ and IPA|/kʷʰ/. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to IPA|/p/ and IPA|/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 IPA|/pʰ/ that came to be pronounced IPA|/f/ in Modern Greek. The Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V to represent IPA|/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, though see Q without U. In English this digraph most often denotes the cluster IPA|/kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents IPA|/k/ as in "plaque". In Italian qu represents IPA| [kw] (where IPA| [w] is an allophone of IPA|/u/); in German, IPA|/kv/; and in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Spanish, and Catalan, IPA|/k/ or IPA|/kw/. (In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan and French, "qu" replaces c for IPA|/k/ 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, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, as well as romanised Arabic, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. IPA| [q] is also used in the 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, IPA|/c/. In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, Q is used to represent the sound IPA| [tɕʰ] , which is close to English "ch" in "cheese".

In Fijian, Q represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive IPA| [ŋɡ] .

In Xhosa and Zulu, Q represents the postalveolar click IPA| [kǃ] .

In Kiowa, Q represents a glottalized velar plosive, IPA|/kʼ/.

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.

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".

Codes for computing

Letter
NATO=Quebec
Morse= – – · –
Character=Q
Braille=⠟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.

References

See also

* List of English words containing Q not followed by U
* Ќ
* Қ

af:Q
als:Q
ar:Q
arc:Q
ast:Q
az:Q
bs:Q
ca:Q
cs:Q
co:Q
cy:Q
da:Q
de:Q
el:Q
es:Q
eo:Q
eu:Q
fa:Q
fur:Q
gan:Q
gd:Q
gl:Q
ko:Q
hr:Q
ilo:Q
is:Q
it:Q
he:Q
ka:Q
kw:Q
sw:Q
ht:Q
la:Q
lv:Q
lt:Q
hu:Q
mzn:Q
ms:Q
nah:Q
ja:Q
no:Q
nn:Q
nrm:Q
pl:Q
pt:Q
ro:Q
qu:Q
scn:Q
simple:Q
sl:Q
fi:Q
sv:Q
tl:Q
th:Q
vi:Q
vo:Q
yo:Q
zh-yue:Q
bat-smg:Q
zh:Q