Why is the letter “Q” always followed by a “U”? (With the exception of a few words taken directly from other languages.) Why aren’t words spelled like qick, qeen, or qestion?
As far as I can tell, it’s the only mandatory letter combination in the English language. I believe it’s also a rule in French and Spanish. How common is the “qu” rule in other languages?
“Q” itself originated in early Athenian and Phoenician alphabets to represent a deeper and more gutteral sounding “k”. From there, “q” entered the Latin alphabet.
The “qu” combination comes from the Latin “qv” combination, and was used for the “kw” sound (there being no letter “k” or “w” in the Latin alphabet).
(Yes, I know that the Latins borrowed a few Greek words that used “k”, such as Kalends.)
But in English, the Q was imported by the Normans. Before they so rudely invaded, queen and quick were spelled with a cw-.
I’ve always felt Q is an entirely useless letter. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do with a K and a W. For that matter, C is also useless; it doesn’t do anything that you can’t do with a K or S. And don’t get me started on X. X, the “I don’t need ‘ks’ because I’m special” letter.
Feh.
English, as a syntactical and structured language, really sucks balls.
So, friedo…with no C, how do you propose we spell ‘which?’ I guess we could make a letter with the ‘ch’ sound.
Jman
In the original Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets from which our Roman alphabet is derived, q and k were different sounds. They still are in Hebrew and Arabic. Q comes from further back on the palate.
Interestingly, all letters were originally consonants, as they still are in the Hebrew alphabet . For instance, A was originally the glottal stop (Arabic hamza).
How about ‘whitsh’ or better yet ‘witsh’?
In several languages that recently adopted the Roman alphabet, they use the letter c by itself to spell the sound we spell with “ch”. For example, Malay, Indonesian, Hausa simply use c without needing an h after it.
Like in Italian cello or Pacino.
They don’t have any other use for c, since k is used for the /k/ sound, and s is used for the /s/ sound. Likewise, Indologists use c by itself for the “ch” sound in Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and the other Indian languages. e.g. cakra is the scholarly spelling for what other people write as “chakra”.
Chinese Pinyin uses q for the palatal “ch” sound, while they use ch for the retroflex “ch” sound. There’s a phonemic difference between the two in Chinese. Pinyin uses c for the palatal “ts” sound, and they use ts for the retroflex “ts” sound.
Here’s one out of left field: Fijian uses c for the sound of “th” in “this”. As if they said, Here’s a leftover letter we’re not using for anything else, and we need something for this sound. What about q? In Fijian, g stands for the velar nasal sound of “ng” in singer, and q stands for that sound plus “g”, the ngg sound in “finger”. So Fijian yaqona (kava-kava drink) is pronounced “yanggona”.
In very early Latin, when they first began to write it, they had a convention that the unvoiced velar stop was spelled with k before a and o (thus “kalendae”), with c before e and i, and with q before u. But they dropped that and just used c in all positions, except that they kept the q before u when it was followed by another vowel.
The original sound of q in the Semitic languages was a postvelar stop, articulated farther back in the throat than k, as Tansu pointed out. That must be why it was associated with u, since u is a back vowel. The specialized use of c only before front vowels perhaps suggested its palatal articulation, further front. Perhaps the ancient Romans distinguished three sounds of [k]: postvelar (q), velar (k), and palatal ©. But since they weren’t different phonemes in the Latin language, they didn’t need three different symbols for them; one would do.
Something similar went on in Ottoman Turkish spelling: originally the back vowels were spelled with the Arabic letter q and the front vowels with the Arabic k. But when Turkish was romanized in 1928, they dropped the q and dropped the distinction, and just used k in all positions. (But they still need to distinguish when k has a palatal sound before a back vowel, so they use the circumflex: kab with velar k means ‘cover, lid’, but kâb with palatal k means ‘ankle’.
Albanian does just the reverse: In Albanian q is used for the palatal “k” sound, as in Shqip ‘Albanian’.
As any Scrabble fan can tell u, your q is not true.
qat, qanat, qoph, qaid, qintar, qindar and qiviut
Who said you need a U after Q ? I don’t believe it!
Well, like someone (who’s name I am too lazy to scroll down and look for) said, ch is just sh with a t before it.
Which —> witsh
Ahhh…but then you have to write extra letters. 
Or you could be a linguistics major and write everything using the IPA phonetic alphabet. Yayfun.
I don’t mind writing extra letters here and there if the overall system is easier. The extra letters would be more than made up for by the elimination of useless letters in other words, like the H’s in the “wh” words, and the C’s in words that have a “ck” in them, and so on.
The h in wh- is not a useless letter. It shows that the w is voiceless. It’s phonemically different from voiced w. “Which” and “witch” form a minimal pair that illustrates the difference in the two phonemes.
I’m aware that a lot of people nowadays don’t pronounce the h sound any more, but that’s too bad. Other people still do!
And then there’s George Bernard Shaw’s famous spelling of “Fish” – GHOTI. That’s “GH” as in “rough”, “o” as in “Women” and “ti” as in “attention”. f=i=sh.
Dr_Paprika, don’t forget tranq!
[Homer]
mmmmmm, Scrabble…
[/Homer]
I’d always thought it had to do with aspiration, not voicing. At least that’s the way the teacher tried to teach me back in about 4th grade (well, she didn’t use those terms, but that’s what she meant). The WH would be aspirated and the plain W not.
There are some dialects that distinguish these sounds and some that don’t. I’ve never been really sure which I belong to. Sometimes I aspirate, sometimes not.
…oh, and qwerty…wait, where did everybody go?