Q with stroke

Ꝗ and ꝗ in the font Computer Modern

Ꝗ as used in this French-language extract of page 9 of Joachim du Bellay's 1549 work La Défense et illustration de la langue française. The text of the extract is: Barbares anciẽnement etoint nõmez ceux, ꝗ ĩeptemẽt ꝑloint Grec.

Q with stroke (Ꝗ, ꝗ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from writing the letter Q with the addition of a bar through the letter's descender. The letter was used by scribes during the Middle Ages, where it was employed primarily as an abbreviation^[1]—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 it was used in the Lezgin language, but that language now uses a Cyrillic alphabet without the letter. The Dargin language was also written with ꝗ before 1938.

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).^[1] In the French language, ꝗ was used as an abbreviation for the word que;^[2] in Irish, it abbreviated ar.^[1] Closely related is the letter Q with diagonal stroke (Ꝙ, ꝙ), which stood alone to abbreviate quod, qui and que in Latin.^[1] In Portuguese, ꝙ also abbreviated quem.^[1]

Q with diagonal stroke in Doulos SIL

Computer encoding[]

Ꝗ, 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.^[1] It resides in the Latin Extended-D block of the Basic Multilingual Plane.

References[]