Arabic - why Q instead of K
November 1, 2004 1:16 PM Subscribe
Why, when romanizing Arabic words and names, is the U-less Q used instead of K?
But there's really no such thing in English as a U-less Q, so what sound does it make?
posted by smackfu at 2:27 PM on November 1, 2004
posted by smackfu at 2:27 PM on November 1, 2004
What adamrice said. It sounds vaguely like a K sound, but is deeper, with a guttural sound that is produced in the back of your throat more.
The closest thing I can suggest, if you want to approximate this sound, is to drop your jaw, make an "O" with your lips, and say the word "cough" at a decent volume. You'll have trouble finishing the "F" sound at the end of the word with your lips in an O-shape, but you may manage to spit out something like the "Q" in "qamees," "quran," "saddeeq." Say "cough" in this fashion again and again, and now just drop the "ough" part altogether and keep going. Your tongue should not touch your front teeth, only the mid/rear of the roof of your mouth.
posted by scarabic at 2:42 PM on November 1, 2004
The closest thing I can suggest, if you want to approximate this sound, is to drop your jaw, make an "O" with your lips, and say the word "cough" at a decent volume. You'll have trouble finishing the "F" sound at the end of the word with your lips in an O-shape, but you may manage to spit out something like the "Q" in "qamees," "quran," "saddeeq." Say "cough" in this fashion again and again, and now just drop the "ough" part altogether and keep going. Your tongue should not touch your front teeth, only the mid/rear of the roof of your mouth.
posted by scarabic at 2:42 PM on November 1, 2004
Also note that it isn't always a Q, since there are varying methods of Romanizing Arabic.
posted by jjg at 2:47 PM on November 1, 2004
posted by jjg at 2:47 PM on November 1, 2004
Smackfu--the Q is just a placeholder. If we're going to romanize it, we need to use one of the letters (or letters plus diacritics, etc) available on our keyboard. The Q may be somewhat arbitrary, but whoever made up that romanization system decided to use Q, so that's what we've got.
posted by adamrice at 3:02 PM on November 1, 2004
posted by adamrice at 3:02 PM on November 1, 2004
...the tongue doesn't touch the front teeth when making the 'qu' sound, either. At least, not in my mouth.
posted by bingo at 3:34 PM on November 1, 2004
posted by bingo at 3:34 PM on November 1, 2004
it's more like a gutteral "kuh"-- like in "cup", no?
posted by amberglow at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2004
posted by amberglow at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2004
q is used for the letter qaf. k is used for the letter kaf.
kaf is essentially the same sound as English k.
qaf is an unvoiced stop made further back in the mouth (uvular is the academic term, I think...).
Another attribute of these sounds is that they color neighboring vowels. A vowel after qaf will be pronounced farther back in the mouth. So, the vowel in "kaf" would sound like a French "a" or even an English short "a". The vowel in "qaf" would be pulled back in the mouth and sound more like English "aw".
The letter "qaf" is descended from the same ancient sign as our Q is--so is Hebrew qoph, which still has the same sound.
Other nearby languages have borrowed lots of Arabic words, but don't have the "qaf" sound, so many of them (like Farsi) just use the sound of Arabic "ghayn" in the borrowed words, which is like a fricative "g" (or Dutch "g"). I'm not sure what Turkish does.
It's not uncommon for news orgs to use K, KH, or something else instead of Q for qaf--compare all the variant spellings of "Qaddafi".
Arabic is loaded with bunches of these back-of-the-throat phonemes, which is what gives it its stereotypical sound. In English-language atlases, you'll see these written with a dot, or maybe a cedilla, under the letter. (The saying is that Arabic is the "language of dad" --pronounced "dodd"--, because supposedly the sound of that letter only occurs in Arabic.) Oddly enough, the letters for the "weird" back sounds are used fairly often when European words and names are written in Arabic.
posted by gimonca at 4:26 PM on November 1, 2004
kaf is essentially the same sound as English k.
qaf is an unvoiced stop made further back in the mouth (uvular is the academic term, I think...).
Another attribute of these sounds is that they color neighboring vowels. A vowel after qaf will be pronounced farther back in the mouth. So, the vowel in "kaf" would sound like a French "a" or even an English short "a". The vowel in "qaf" would be pulled back in the mouth and sound more like English "aw".
The letter "qaf" is descended from the same ancient sign as our Q is--so is Hebrew qoph, which still has the same sound.
Other nearby languages have borrowed lots of Arabic words, but don't have the "qaf" sound, so many of them (like Farsi) just use the sound of Arabic "ghayn" in the borrowed words, which is like a fricative "g" (or Dutch "g"). I'm not sure what Turkish does.
It's not uncommon for news orgs to use K, KH, or something else instead of Q for qaf--compare all the variant spellings of "Qaddafi".
Arabic is loaded with bunches of these back-of-the-throat phonemes, which is what gives it its stereotypical sound. In English-language atlases, you'll see these written with a dot, or maybe a cedilla, under the letter. (The saying is that Arabic is the "language of dad" --pronounced "dodd"--, because supposedly the sound of that letter only occurs in Arabic.) Oddly enough, the letters for the "weird" back sounds are used fairly often when European words and names are written in Arabic.
posted by gimonca at 4:26 PM on November 1, 2004
I got an email from a nice lurker about this:
If you refer askme readers to http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html, the sound that Q represents in arabic transliteration is probably the voiceless uvular plosive (the lowercase q on the chart). However, beware- if names are taken from farsi, the q usually indicates the voiced velar fricative- next to the x on the chart.
posted by amberglow at 4:44 PM on November 1, 2004
If you refer askme readers to http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html, the sound that Q represents in arabic transliteration is probably the voiceless uvular plosive (the lowercase q on the chart). However, beware- if names are taken from farsi, the q usually indicates the voiced velar fricative- next to the x on the chart.
posted by amberglow at 4:44 PM on November 1, 2004
so is Hebrew qoph, which still has the same sound.
I'm assuming that you mean the hebrew kaf, not to be confused with the arab kaf (I guess), and occuring in the alphabet between yud and lamed. Or maybe you mean kuf, occuring between tzadi and resh in the alphabet? In my anglo-judaic experience, i've never seen a hebrew letter transliterated as anything that looks like "qoph."
posted by bingo at 5:26 PM on November 1, 2004
I'm assuming that you mean the hebrew kaf, not to be confused with the arab kaf (I guess), and occuring in the alphabet between yud and lamed. Or maybe you mean kuf, occuring between tzadi and resh in the alphabet? In my anglo-judaic experience, i've never seen a hebrew letter transliterated as anything that looks like "qoph."
posted by bingo at 5:26 PM on November 1, 2004
Hebrew Letter Qof: notice the resemblance to "Q". Me, I've never seen it transliterated "kuf". Seen it lots of places like this.
posted by gimonca at 8:08 PM on November 1, 2004
posted by gimonca at 8:08 PM on November 1, 2004
gimonca, you linked to the letter "koof" (which is completely different than the letter "kaf", btw). However, I see you have it googled, but it really isn't known as an acceptable transliteration from Hebrew as"qof" or "qoph". Through all my years of hebrew school, I've never heard this before. Basically, there is no transliteration from Hebrew to English utilizing the letter Q because it doesn't appear in the Hebrew "aleph-bet". That is why it is incorrect to transliterate any Hebrew into an English Q.
Also, the way Hebrew deals with the "qu" is by either using the letters kaf + vav = literally "kv", or sometimes using kaf + vav + vav = literally "kw". So by using the example of the word "queen", you'd literally translate as 'Kveen' or 'Kween'. However, Hebrew does indeed have its own word for queen = Malkah. (mem + lamed + kaf + hey).
Example: If Queen Latifah toured Israel, they wouldn't call her "Mal-kah Latifah", ("mal-kah" being the hebrew world for queen). Instead, they'd spell it out "Kof vav vav yud noon-sofeet" + "latifah". Confusing? Yes indeedy.
posted by naxosaxur at 9:46 PM on November 1, 2004
Also, the way Hebrew deals with the "qu" is by either using the letters kaf + vav = literally "kv", or sometimes using kaf + vav + vav = literally "kw". So by using the example of the word "queen", you'd literally translate as 'Kveen' or 'Kween'. However, Hebrew does indeed have its own word for queen = Malkah. (mem + lamed + kaf + hey).
Example: If Queen Latifah toured Israel, they wouldn't call her "Mal-kah Latifah", ("mal-kah" being the hebrew world for queen). Instead, they'd spell it out "Kof vav vav yud noon-sofeet" + "latifah". Confusing? Yes indeedy.
posted by naxosaxur at 9:46 PM on November 1, 2004
But you're missing the big picture here. Nobody's talking about English "qu". Uvular q is the original sound of the hebrew letter...and the Arabic letter, and the Phoenician letter, and the Syriac letter. Note Syriac "qop" in that listing, yet another cousin in the family. We're all related, you know (and I mean we in a very, very broad sense there). It is not a representation of a Hebrew letter as "the sound of English q"--it's the representation of the Hebrew letter qoph by the glyph Q because it distinguishes it from kaph/kaf, and because the original sound was the same as modern Arabic qaf (and the related Syriac letter, etc.), and ultimately, they were all the same letter anyway.
Standard English usage generally runs like this.
I'd tend not to write "kuf" myself--doesn't seem distinct enough, as this thread itself shows. Googling on "kuf" does show a lot of documents with Yiddish connections: just a guess, but maybe it's a transliteration influenced by Yiddish usage?
Oh, and why does the name of the Hebrew letter have a back vowel in it? Because the initial consonant (that uvular Q) pulled the vowel back in the mouth. In environments where the pronounciation of k and q became the same (comparable to English K), the back vowel remains to keep a distinction between the two words. See how it works? Maybe we do return to English "qu" after all, with its slightly pulled back "kw" sound. And "kaf" versus "kuf" in Yiddish would retain the distinction after the letter names had been borrowed into an environment where there is no uvular q sound.
Finally, think of it mathematically in terms of a one-way function. If you convert both kaph/kaf and qoph/qof/kuf into English "k", how will you know which was which if you want to convert them back again? A one-to-one correspondence is easier.
posted by gimonca at 8:29 AM on November 2, 2004
Standard English usage generally runs like this.
I'd tend not to write "kuf" myself--doesn't seem distinct enough, as this thread itself shows. Googling on "kuf" does show a lot of documents with Yiddish connections: just a guess, but maybe it's a transliteration influenced by Yiddish usage?
Oh, and why does the name of the Hebrew letter have a back vowel in it? Because the initial consonant (that uvular Q) pulled the vowel back in the mouth. In environments where the pronounciation of k and q became the same (comparable to English K), the back vowel remains to keep a distinction between the two words. See how it works? Maybe we do return to English "qu" after all, with its slightly pulled back "kw" sound. And "kaf" versus "kuf" in Yiddish would retain the distinction after the letter names had been borrowed into an environment where there is no uvular q sound.
Finally, think of it mathematically in terms of a one-way function. If you convert both kaph/kaf and qoph/qof/kuf into English "k", how will you know which was which if you want to convert them back again? A one-to-one correspondence is easier.
posted by gimonca at 8:29 AM on November 2, 2004
But there's really no such thing in English as a U-less Q, so what sound does it make?
One word from english with a q with no u: qwerty (enjoy the pronunciation).
A list.
posted by shepd at 12:25 PM on November 2, 2004
One word from english with a q with no u: qwerty (enjoy the pronunciation).
A list.
posted by shepd at 12:25 PM on November 2, 2004
gimonca, I admit that I don't really know what you're talking about in terms of the 'back vowel.' But nobody (except you, I guess) transliterates Hebrew letters into English using a Q. Like naxosaxur, I spent a lot of time in hebrew school, and have read a ton of transliterated prayers in an embarassingly wide range of holiday (and non-holiday) prayerbooks, and had to also read books on Hebrew itself. I know more about this than I want to know, and I never saw a Q anywhere.
posted by bingo at 7:47 PM on November 4, 2004
posted by bingo at 7:47 PM on November 4, 2004
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Lots of languages have sounds that are almost but not quite the same, produced in different parts of the mouth. Chinese has two different sounds that approximate "sh"; these are romanized as "x" and "sh" in pinyin, but both are produced with the tongue in slightly different positions than we use to produce "sh" in English.
posted by adamrice at 1:52 PM on November 1, 2004