Q with stroke

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.

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.

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.

Character information
Preview	Ꝗ		ꝗ		Ꝙ		ꝙ
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q WITH STROKE		LATIN SMALL LETTER Q WITH STROKE		LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q WITH DIAGONAL STROKE		LATIN SMALL LETTER Q WITH DIAGONAL STROKE
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	42838	U+A756	42839	U+A757	42840	U+A758	42841	U+A759
UTF-8	234 157 150	EA 9D 96	234 157 151	EA 9D 97	234 157 152	EA 9D 98	234 157 153	EA 9D 99
Numeric character reference	Ꝗ	Ꝗ	ꝗ	ꝗ	Ꝙ	Ꝙ	ꝙ	ꝙ
ISO 5426-2	104	68	120	78

gollark: But schools really do like the whole "memorizing random stuff" thing.

gollark: You would HOPE so.

gollark: My school (not university, I think the equivalent is high school or something elsewhere) is handling it *somewhat* okay, but possibly partly because it would mostly be revision for the (now cancelled) GCSEs anyway at this point.

gollark: Surely at least part of the point of the grades you get from school/whatever is to show that you're actually qualified to do whatever subject it is.

gollark: That sounds like it would basically make the grades for the year meaningless.

References

Everson, Michael; et al. (2006-01-30). "Proposal to add medievalist characters to the UCS" (PDF). The Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 2017-02-01.
du Bellay, Joachim (1549). "La Deffence, et illvstration de la langue francoyse". Wikisource (in French). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2017-02-01.

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[:0-1] Everson, Michael; et al. (2006-01-30). "Proposal to add medievalist characters to the UCS" (PDF). The Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 2017-02-01.

[2] u Bellay, Joachim (1549). "La Deffence, et illvstration de la langue francoyse". Wikisource (in French). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2017-02-01.