# letter Q



## SerinusCanaria3075

I was just curious to know if this letter ever existed in Romanian. I looked at the cyrillic alphabet that was used to write Romanian before 1860 and noticed some Greek letters like "_psi_ and _thita_" but the letter Q was nowhere in sight. 
It's kind of strange that the Romanian alphabet does not include this letter since it was an important letter in the Latin language and I was surprised that almost all other Romance languages but Romanian have it.


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## Outsider

"Q" is a redundant letter in Latin and the Romance languages. It's pronounced like a "C". Italian only held on to it for etymological reasons. I guess the orthography of Romanian is more phonetic.


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## OldAvatar

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> I was just curious to know if this letter ever existed in Romanian. I looked at the cyrillic alphabet that was used to write Romanian before 1860 and noticed some Greek letters like "_psi_ and _thita_" but the letter Q was nowhere in sight.
> It's kind of strange that the Romanian alphabet does not include this letter since it was an important letter in the Latin language and I was surprised that almost all other Romance languages but Romanian have it.



In Romanian, you can only find letter *Q *in neologisms. The presence of this letter is practically futile, since in Romanian you use letter *C* for exactly the same sound. The existence of this letter is only justified by the desire of keeping the initial ortography of such words (i.e. *quaker*, *quasar*, *quetzal *etc.). The same rule is applied for letter *K*, which is absolutely useless, since in Romanian you have a perfect equivalent: the group of letters *che/**chi *or letter* C.

*Best regards!


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## SerinusCanaria3075

Thanks to both. I also think that the _K_ is not very useful in modern Romance languages. Italian eliminated the K (along with J, W, X, Y) and in Spanish there are very few words that require it (kilo). The best example of the Q/C relationship is the word "when":
Français: *Q*uand
Português/Italiano: *Q*uando
Español: *C*uando
Rumanian: *C*ând


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## JGreco

But you cannot produce the word "que" in Castellano without the "qu". Many spanish words can not be pronounced without "q". You can't turn "que" into "qe' or "ke". It is impossible for the letter "q" to disappear from Castellano without orthographic change to occur in a language.


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## Outsider

The graphemes _c_ and _qu_ correspond to the same sound, the phoneme /k/, and they are complementary. This phoneme could be represented by a single letter, for example _k_. Naturally, this would change the orthography of Spanish, but that's beside the point.


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## SerinusCanaria3075

> Many spanish words can not be pronounced without "q". You can't turn "que" into "qe' or "ke".


Of course, I love the letter Q, my problem is the K which is useless in modern romance languages (maybe French needs it a bit) since the Spanish _kilo_ could be "quilo" and so far the only Romanian word I've seen with K is Kilogram (does "chilo" exist?).


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## OldAvatar

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Of course, I love the letter Q, my problem is the K which is useless in modern romance languages (maybe French needs it a bit) since the Spanish _kilo_ could be "quilo" and so far the only Romanian word I've seen with K is Kilogram (does "chilo" exist?).



In Romanian, there are quite a few neologisms begining with *K* (*karate*, *kaiser* etc.). But, of course, the most known is *kilogram. *In spoken language, you can often hear the shortened word *chil*. So, it's not _chilo_, probably because of a rule which says that you shouldn't have shortened words ending in a vowel.


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