Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:37:35 -0400
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: minding one's p's and q's
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

> ronkean at juno.com 04/16/04 12:49AM
>>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')?

"Wy chanje English spelling?"
<http://www.spellingsociety.org/>
. . .  atleast I think they're serious . .

mjw

>
>Ron Kean
>