Eli5 : Why is q always followed by u in a word?
In: 1555
Qu was used for the /kw/ sound in Latin already. This idea came from the Etruscans, who based it off early Greek who took it from the Phoenicians who used their original version of the letter for a deeper k sound (like the current usage in the phonetic alphabet or transcriptions of Arabic, in which case it’s *not* followed by u), which wasn’t present in Greek or Latin causing the redundancy. The romans used the q for various k sounds but everything but qu got displaced by c eventually along with k’s, the qoppa letter got displaced from the Greek alphabet altogether.
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