To: WSFAlist at WSFA.org
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 00:49:54 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] minding one's p's and q's
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 23:39:23 -0400 (EDT) "Keith F. Lynch"
<kfl at KeithLynch.net> writes:

> I've heard that Arabic has a much more severe form of this problem:
> In that language, there are certain pairs of letters than are
> always
> printed in a certain order whenever they are adjacent, even though
> this often makes a word turn into a completely different word.
> It's
> as if English had a rule that whenever "tr" would appear, it should
> be printed as "rt" instead.  And people just had to guess from
> context
> whether this had been done, or whether "rt" was really meant.
>

For some reason, that story brings to mind the matter of English's
'useless' letter: q.  Unless 'q' occurs in a proper name, or some word
borrowed from another language such as Arabic, it is always followed by
'u', in English.  (Anyone is free to provide a counter-example, if one
exists.  'NASDAQ' doesn't count.)  So if 'q' were to be dropped from the
English alphabet, 'question' could just as well be spelled 'cuestion', or
'cwestion'.  About the only use I can think of for 'q' is that it
sometimes distinguishes one word from another, e.g 'cue' versus 'queue'
or 'que'.  But such a result could be achieved without 'q', by agreeing,
perhaps, to spell 'queue' as 'kue', or 'kew', or 'cu', or 'keu', or
somesuch.

So the question is, why does English have the useless letter?  The
obvious answer is that the 'qu' digraph was inherited from Latin, though
in Latin it was usually written 'qv'.  So the question becomes, how did
Latin get the 'qv' (or 'qu') digraph, when 'cv' (or 'cu') would work just
as well, e.g 'cvaestor' for 'qvaestor' (or 'cuaestor' for 'quaestor')?

Ron Kean

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