Latin letter Q with stroke through descender

Q with stroke (Ꝗ, ꝗ) is a letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

, derived from writing the letter Q with the addition of a

bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar ** Chocolate bar * Protein bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a laye ...

through the letter's

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a grapheme that extends below the Baseline (typography), baseline of a typeface, font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal li ...

. The letter was used by

scribes A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing. The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as secretarial and ...

during the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

, where it was employed primarily as an

abbreviation An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening (linguistics), shortening, contraction (grammar), contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened for ...

a modern parallel of this would be abbreviating the word "and" with an ampersand ( &). The letter was also used to write some modern languages. Between 1928 and 1938, the

Lezgin Lezgin, Lezgi, Lezgian, Lezghian or Lek can refer to: * Lezgins, a people from southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan * Lezgin language Lezgian, also called Lezgi or Lezgin , is a Northeast Caucasian language. It is spoken by the Lezgins, wh ...

and

Dargin Dargin may refer to: *Dargwa language, Caucasus *Dargwa people Dargins or Dargwa (, ''darganti'') are a Northeast Caucasian native ethnic group originating in the North Caucasus, and who make up the second largest ethnic group in the North Cau ...

alphabets had used Ꝗ, but since 1938, both corresponding languages are written with Cyrillic-based alphabets, using the digraph Кь in place of Ꝗ. When used to write the

Latin language Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, ꝗ could be used alone or as part of a word. Alone, it stood for '' quam''; as part of a word, it stood for either ''quan-'' (as in ''ꝗdo'' for '' quando'') or ''qui-'' (as in ''ꝗlꝫ'' for '' quilibet''). In the French language, ꝗ was used as an abbreviation for the word ''que''; in Irish, it abbreviated ''ar''. Closely related is the letter Q with diagonal stroke (Ꝙ, ꝙ), which stood alone to abbreviate ''

quod Quod may refer to: * ''The Quod'', a contemporary nickname for the English Quota System during the Napoleonic Wars * a ''quod'', the main playing item in the fictional sport of Quodpot in the Harry Potter universe * Quod (board game), an abstra ...

'', '' qui'' and '' que'' in Latin. In Portuguese, ꝙ also abbreviated ''

quem Quem may refer to: * Quem people, a historic ethnic group of Texas and Mexico * Quem language, their language * ''Quem'' (magazine), a Brazilian magazine published by Editora Globo Editora Globo S.A. is a Brazilian publishing house, property of ...

''.

Computer encoding

Ꝗ and Ꝙ, along with other letters of interest to scholars of medieval manuscripts, was added to the Unicode Standard in 2006 after a request by

Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irish linguistics, linguist, Character encoding, script encoder, typesetting, typesetter, type designer and Publishing, publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which ...

. It resides in the

Latin Extended-D Latin Extended-D is a Unicode block containing Latin (script), Latin characters for phonetic, Mayanist, and Medieval transcription and notation systems. 89 of the characters in this block are for medieval characters proposed by the Medieval Unic ...

block of the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...

References

{{Latin script, Q, stroke Phonetic transcription symbols Latin letters with diacritics