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
PreviewꝖꝗꝘꝙ
Unicode nameLATIN 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
Encodingsdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhex
Unicode42838U+A75642839U+A75742840U+A75842841U+A759
UTF-8234 157 150EA 9D 96234 157 151EA 9D 97234 157 152EA 9D 98234 157 153EA 9D 99
Numeric character referenceꝖꝖꝗꝗꝘꝘꝙꝙ
ISO 5426-21046812078

References
  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. 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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