Owing to the allowable variation between letters Q, Q is a very distinctive feature of a typeface as &, Q is oft cited as a letter that gives type designers a greater opportunity at self-expression. The long-tailed Q had fallen out of use with the advent of early digital typography, as many early digital fonts could not choose different glyphs based on the word that the glyph was in, but it has seen something of a comeback with the advent of OpenType fonts and LaTeX, both of which can automatically typeset the long-tailed Q when it is called for and the short-tailed Q when it is not. Latin-language words, which are much more likely than English words to contain "Q" as their first letter, have also been cited as the reason for their existence. Updike celebrated their demise in his 1922 book Printing Types, claiming that Renaissance printers made their Q tails longer and longer simply to "outdo each other". Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer D. This print tradition was alive and well until the 19th century, when long-tailed Qs fell out of favor: even recreations of classic typefaces such as Caslon began being distributed with only short Q tails. Some early metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs: a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u ligature. Old-style serif fonts, such as Garamond, may contain two capital Qs: one with a short tail to be used in short words, and another with a long tail to be used in long words. A common method among type designers to create the shape of the Q is by simply adding a tail to the letter O. Typefaces with a disconnected Q tail, while uncommon, have existed since at least 1529. All three styles are considered equally valid, with most serif typefaces having a Q with a tail that meets the circle, while sans-serif typefaces are more equally split between those with bisecting tails and those without. In writing block letters, bisecting tails are fastest to write, as they require less precision. : 77 Uppercase "Q"ĭepending on the typeface used to typeset the letter Q, the letter's tail may either bisect its bowl as in Helvetica, meet the bowl as in Univers, or lie completely outside the bowl as in PT Sans. The short-tailed Q is only used when the word is shorter than the tail the long-tailed Q is even used in all-capitals text. TypographyĪ short trilingual text showing the proper use of the long- and short-tailed Q. 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. Of these, Q was used before a rounded vowel (e.g. 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. The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/, and this usage was copied by the Romans with the rest of their alphabet. Therefore, qoppa was transformed into two letters: qoppa, which stood for the number 90, and phi (Φ), which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ respectively. In an early form of Ancient Greek, qoppa (Ϙ) probably came to represent several labialized velar stops, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. Some have even suggested that the form of the letter Q is even more ancient: it could have originated from Egyptian hieroglyphics. q/ is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. The Semitic sound value of Qôp was /q/ ( voiceless uvular stop), and the form of the letter could have been based on the eye of a needle, a knot, or even a monkey with its tail hanging down. Its name in English is pronounced / ˈ k j uː/, most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue and que. Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide.
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