Q is the seventeenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled cue (pronounced /kjuː/).[1]
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph wj |
Phoenician Q |
Etruscan Q |
Greek Qoppa |
| <hiero>V24</hiero> |
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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/.
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 /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/ or /kw/. (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 Albanian, q represents the voiceless palatal plosive, /c/. In the Aymara, Azeri, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] 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. 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 Fijian, Q represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ]. In Xhosa and Zulu, Q represents the postalveolar click [kǃ]. Q is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it in English, 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".
Codes for computing
Alternative representations of Q
In Unicode the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lowercase q is U+0071. The ASCII code for capital Q is 81 and for lowercase q is 113; or in binary 01010001 and 01110001, correspondingly. 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.
Meanings of Q
- See Q (disambiguation).
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.
- "Q" Added To Stock Ticker Symbol: When a company is involved in bankruptcy proceedings, the letter "Q" is added to the end of the company's stock ticker symbol. When a company emerges from bankruptcy, in most cases the plan of reorganization will cancel the existing equity stock.
- Q is never used as the initial letter in the call sign of any radio or television station, being prohibited from such use by the ITU anywhere in the world (as of 2007).
Abbreviations
- 'Q' = Stock symbol for Qwest Communications International Inc.
- 'Q' = Qualified Developmental Disabilities Professional (aka QP or QDDP).
- 'Q' = Medical Term for Cardiac Output.
- 'Q' = Stroke Volume * Heart Rate (SV*HR)
See also
