Q with stroke (Ꝗ, ꝗ) is a letter of the
Latin alphabet, 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
Science and technology
* Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment
* Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud
* Bar (u ...
through the letter's
descender. The letter was used by
scribes during the
Middle Ages, where it was employed primarily as an
abbreviation
An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...
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 and
Dargin 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, 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'', ''
qui'' and ''
que
QUE or que may refer to:
* Quebec (Que.), as the traditional abbreviation, though the postal abbreviations are now QC and previously PQ
* Que Publishing, a company which first began as a publisher of technical computer software and hardware sup ...
'' 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. (Globo Editors) is a Brazilian publishing ho ...
''.
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.
It resides in the
Latin Extended-D block of the
Basic Multilingual Plane.
References
{{Latin script, Q, stroke
Phonetic transcription symbols
Latin letters with diacritics