# word start with letter "q" but not followed by "u"



## mrr010

Hi,
I'm interested in the character "q". I am looking for any word originated from English that start with "q" but not "qu".
However, I don't want words that comes from other language such as Arabic, Chinese and etc.
Thank you.


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## reno33

You're looking for something that doesn't exist.  Sorry.


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## lingobingo

I don’t think there are any such words in English that _haven’t_ been imported from another language.


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## mrr010

What about words that contain "q" but not "qu"?
If there is no words that contains q with other alphebet, I am wondering why do we have "q" but not something to replace "qu"?


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## JulianStuart

mrr010 said:


> What about words that contain "q" but not "qu"?


Nope


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## lingobingo

There are no intrinsically English words that fit that description either. There may be a few imported words, which the average English-speaker probably isn’t even familiar with. The only one I can immediately think of is *niqab*.


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## mrr010

lingobingo said:


> There are no intrinsically English words that fit that description either. There may be a few imported words, which the average English-speaker probably isn’t even familiar with. The only one I can immediately think of is *niqab*.


Thank you. But still as you said, even niqab is imported.
So actually my wonder is, if "q" must comes with "u", why don't we have a letter to actually represent "qu"? Why did we invent "q" which is so weird?


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## KHS

There's also the concept of "not imported from another language."  On that basis, all words that come from Latin or a Romance language (such as French) are not included.  Much more of English is imported than is Celtic - or even Anglo-Saxon, depending on what you think of as "original" English.


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## JulianStuart

In the formation of "English" words we only accumulated words over the centuries from other languages (Latin and French in particular) that already came with a u attached, so you can "blame" those languages.  When we imported words like "al qali" from Arabic, we changed the q to a k -> alkali.  For us, it's far less weird than _single_ characters created by 20+ strokes as in Chinese and Japanese, for example


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## mrr010

Sorry I am not following the import thing. Why in the first place, we have letter "q" instead a letter "qu" when we first create the standard of 26 English alphabet? Is it reasonable to think of "original" English as "whenever 26 alphabet were standardised for the first time"?


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## PaulQ

The letter Q appeared in Latin about 250BC - it was invariably followed by a "U". 

Latin entered the British Isles in about 55BC and was used (mainly in written English) by the Catholic Church (and some other official matters) for the next 1900 years.

All letters Q that are found in English are from that source or more recent imports from other languages.


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## GreenWhiteBlue

mrr010 said:


> Sorry I am not following the import thing. Why in the first place, we have letter "q" instead a letter "qu" when we first create the standard of 26 English alphabet? Is it reasonable to think of "original" English as "whenever 26 alphabet were standardised for the first time"?



As noted above, English adopted words from French and from Latin.  Both French and Latin spelled those words with the combination "QU", and English maintained that combination.  As for "original" English, Old English had letters that we no longer have, such as  ð and þ, but did not use Q, K, or Z to spell English words.


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## PaulQ

The Wikipedia entry is interesting: Q - Wikipedia


> 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/ (e.g. ⟨KALENDIS⟩ 'calendis'), 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.


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## JulianStuart

mrr010 said:


> Sorry I am not following the import thing. Why in the first place, we have letter "q" instead a letter "qu" when we first create the standard of 26 English alphabet? Is it reasonable to think of "original" English as "whenever 26 alphabet were standardised for the first time"?


It's not that simple (just as Chinese character evolution is not that simple  ).The alphabet is actually "Roman" - the language is English and it uses 26 letters.  Other, notably many European, languages use the "Roman" alphabet but do not necessarily use all the letters and have some of their own "non-Roman" characters and diacritical marks etc.


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## JulianStuart

PaulQ said:


> The Wikipedia entry is interesting: Q - Wikipedia


Indeed.  Quod erat demonstrandum We could quite easily justify saying that in "English" the qu is "one character" , just as æ is/was.


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## dojibear

mrr010 said:


> Why in the first place, we have letter "q" instead a letter "qu" when we first create the standard of 26 English alphabet?


This did not happen. The alphabet was not "first created" for English.

During the middle ages, English-speaking scholars and scientists wrote things using Latin and Greek. When they started writing things in English, they used the Latin alphabet. Over the years, a few changes were made to that alphabet, but not many.

Many French words use QU and pronounce it like K. When those words became part of English, they were spelled the same (unique, briquette...) as they were in French.

Many Latin words use QU and pronounce it like KW. When those words became part of English, they were spelled almost the same (quiet, vanquish) as they were in Latin.


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## berndf

mrr010 said:


> Sorry I am not following the import thing. Why in the first place, we have letter "q" instead a letter "qu" when we first create the standard of 26 English alphabet? Is it reasonable to think of "original" English as "whenever 26 alphabet were standardised for the first time"?


No, Old English did not use the letter _q_. The letter was introduced in Middle English for imported French or Latin words.


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## PaulQ

However, in Futhorc (runic script) there was a letter "cw" - 'cweorþ' - Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary


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## berndf

Yes. It is a very rare Anglo-Saxon rune (not part of the general Futhorc). I don't quite understand why you mention  it in this context. Where is the _q_? In Latin script Old English used "cw" where cweorð occurred in a some manuscripts.


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## Dymn

PaulQ said:


> All letters Q that are found in English are from that source or more recent imports from other languages.


There are also native words with _q_ such as _quick_.


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## berndf

Dymn said:


> There are also native words with _q_ such as _quick_.


Yes, Paul's statement was too strong but from an etymological point of view there is a true core: Native words with /kw/ like _quick_ or _queen_ started to be spelled with _qu_ only in Middle English after _qu_ was introduced for French or Latin loans.


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## Delvo

Qq comes from Greek Ϙϙ, which is not used in modern Greek, so its history only makes sense in terms of ancient Greek and even earlier.

It comes from the same Phoenician letter as Arabic ق and Hebrew ק. This was a separate letter in Phoenician from the ancestor of K, ك/ک, and כ/ך because there were, and still are in most Semitic languages, two separate sounds: K/ك/ک/כ/ך was velar (like our K and G are today), and Ϙ/ق/ק was uvular (a bit farther back, where the back of the mouth meets the top of the throat). That's not a distinction Indo-European languages typically have, so the latter sound gets approximated into the former in most Indo-European speakers' ears and mouths.

That might make you wonder why the Greeks kept both letters at all instead of just picking one. But there was coincidentally another distinction between K-like sounds in Greek, different from the Semitic distinction, so having two letters worked out fine for them at the time...

Greek and Latin both inherited from Proto-Indo-European, along with the plain velar plosives /k/ and /ɡ/ and the aspirated velar /ɡʰ/, another set called "labiovelars", which contained both a labial component and a velar component: {kʷ, ɡʷ, ɡʷʰ}. Greek's labiovelar set then became {kʷ, ɡʷ, *kʷʰ*} because of a prehistoric devoicing of its aspirated plosives (also bʰ→pʰ, dʰ→tʰ, ɡʰ→kʰ). But then, Greek was in the process of losing its labiovelars when it adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians. For example, the Greek word for "horse" was "i*kʷ*os" as written in Linear B during the Bronze Age, then the Bronze Age Collapse happened and Greece was illiterate again for a few centuries, then it was "hi*pp*os" when the Greeks picked up the Phoenician alphabet in the Iron Age, because the labiovelar had converted to a bilabial during the gap.

But some Greek dialects still had a /kʷʰ/ to use this letter for, while it was already used for /pʰ/ in others. (Since neither Ϙϙ nor Κκ had been associated with labialization in Phoenician, you might wonder how the Greeks picked which letter would be. It's because of the vowels after the initial consonant sounds in the letters' names; even if you treat the Semitic /q/ as equivalent to /k/, you still get the name K*a*f or K*a*ppa for Κκ and K*o*f or K*o*ppa for Ϙϙ.) And there were also inconsistencies in handwriting styles, so Ϙϙ was what it looked more like where it was used for /kʷʰ/, and it looked more like Φφ where it was used for /pʰ/, so it ended up as two separate letters. But the shift in the spoken sounds from /kʷʰ/ to /pʰ/ eventually took over universally, so there was no sound that they needed Ϙϙ for anymore. It lingered for a while, being used sometimes where Κκ or Χχ could have been as long as the following vowel sound was rounded (like "o" or "u"), but then it just fell out of use because every sound they could have used it for had another letter... but not before it reached Italy.

By then, the Latin labiovelar set had been reduced to just /kʷ/, which coincidentally matched up just about perfectly with how those Greeks who'd brought the alphabet to Italy were still using Ϙϙ, so the Romans just kept right on using Qq the same way as them: equivalent to Kk, but only before U (with the U acting like our W which didn't exist yet), while Kk (or Cc for reasons that have nothing to do with this) would be used before other vowels. And we've just kept it all this time because we got the alphabet from them.


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