The Pronunciation of Latin qu and gu

Abstract

When the Greeks borrowed the alphabet they took over the Semitic qoph as well as kaph, and they employed the former before back vowels (e.g. Corinthian hipolkes, Kapbv), but in the course of time p was crowded out by K. Scholars have inferred that the extra letter served no useful purpose, because there was no phonemic difference between K before back vowels and in other positions. Similarly the Etruscans borrowed both p and K from the Greeks, and on some early Etruscan inscriptions the use of q is limited in the same way as Gk. p, while k is used only before the vowel a. Etruscan, having no voiced mutes, employed c (from Gk. F) as a voiceless velar mute, and in later Etruscan this character crowded out the other two. Again we may infer that early Etruscan q, as well as k, did not represent a different phoneme from c. Early Latin inscriptions also show the three letters c, k, and q, and there is a tendency to distribute them in the early Etruscan manner. In the course of time k dropped out of standard use except in a few abbreviations, and again we infer that there was no phonemic distinction to be denoted by k. Standard Latin orthography, however, retained q in the digraph qu. We may therefore suspect that this digraph denotes something different from the sound of c plus the sound of consonantal u. Some of the Roman grammarians, to be sure, thought that q, as well as k, was a superfluous letter,' but their testimony about q is worth no more than the statement that h is a superfluous letter since it is a breathing (aspiratio); what these authors really have in mind is that the standard Greek alphabet has just one letter where the Latin alphabet has c, k, and q. Velius Longus 7.75.10 f. K suggests that qu was written instead of cu for the purpose of distinguishing words that would otherwise have been homographs: