Q

Egyptian hieroglyph wj	Phoenician qoph	Etruscan Q	Greek Qoppa

The Semitic soond value o Qôp (aiblins oreeginally qaw, "cord o wool", an possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) wis /q/ (voiceless uvular stop), a soond common tae Semitic leids, but nae foond in Inglis or maist Indo-European anes. In Greek, this sign as Qoppa Ϙ probably came tae represent several labialized velar stops, amang them /kʷ/ an /kʷʰ/. As a result o later soond shifts, thir soonds in Greek chynged tae /p/ an /pʰ/ respectively. Tharefore, Qoppa wis transfairmed intae twa letters: Qoppa, which stuid for a nummer anly, an Phi Φ which stuid for the aspiratit soond /pʰ/ that came tae be pronoonced /f/ in Modren Greek.

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K an Q wur aw uised tae represent the twa soonds /k/ an /ɡ/, which wur nae differentiatit in writin. O thir, Q wis uised afore a roondit vowel (e.g. ⟨EQO⟩ 'ego'), K afore /a/, an C elsewhaur. Later, the uise o C (an its variant G) replaced maist uisages o K an Q: Q survivit anly tae represent /k/ when immediately follaeed bi a /w/ soond. The Etruscans uised Q in conjunction wi V tae represent /kʷ/

• Q̵ q̵ : Latin letter Q wi stroke
• ʠ : Latin letter Q wi huik
• Ɋ ɋ : Latin letter Q wi huik tail
• Ԛ ԛ : Cyrillic letter Qa
• Ќ, ќ : Cyrillic letter Kje
• Қ қ : Cyrillic letter Ka wi descender

¹ An aa for encodins based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.