The Illuminated Letter "Q"

 
Additional Illuminated letter "Q"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.

Q (named cue /ˈkjuː/) is the 17th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

       The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was /q/ (voiceless uvular stop), 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 stops, 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.

       In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds /k/ and /ɡ/, which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used 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 in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/.

       In English the digraph ⟨qu⟩ most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in 'plaque'. See list of English words containing Q not followed by U. ⟨q⟩ is the second-least-common letter in the English language, with a frequency of just 0.09% in words. Only ⟨z⟩ occurs less often. Read more . . .