Sqad ... U And Non U Revisited

[joggerjayne]

Is "u" becoming obsolete?

The setter of yesterday's Guardian crossword was called "Qaos"

So words with a "q" not followed by a "u" ...

Qatar

Qantas

Qaos

Sqad

[bednobs]

Qi

[bednobs]

qat

[jno]

qantm physics - lesser known branch of science that didn't work very well.

[EcclesCake]

Without wishing to be too pedantic, Qantas isn't really a word.

[Hopkirk]

Queers and nancies travelling as stewards.

I'll get me coat.

Answer removed

[Hopkirk]

My mistake, it's:

Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services

[Sqad]

Hoppy...LOL....stop digging.....

[Hopkirk]

That comes from my airline days, when every airline had a different vrsion of its name.

BOAC - Better on a camel
BEA - Back every afternoon
TWA - Try walking across
Sabina - Same awful bloody experience, never again
Alia - Always late in arrival
Gulf - Guaranteed unlimited late flights

[Hopkirk]

OK, so it was Sabena (God rest their souls)

[Khandro]

Then there are those chaps; al Qaeda.

[joggerjayne]

Okay, that's true ... Qantas is not actually a word.

[Clanad]

As I suspected, out of a list of 71 words used in English speaking countries that do not have q followed by u, "67 are loanwords from other languages... predominantly Arabic..." Of the remaining words, two are scientific descriptors and the forced QWERTY, which, in my opinion, isn't really a word in the normative, but rather an euphemism adopted for a specific useage. It's neither noun, verb, adverb or adjective...

Also helpful in this discussion is this from English Language and Useage :

"The early Latins had three different letters for the [k] sound: C K Q. However, they only had one letter to represent the [u] and [w] (or [v]) sounds: V. It became customary to write the sequence [kw] (which is fairly common in Latin) as QV and all other instances of [k] as C. (K dropped out of use in most words.) This usage survived into most other European languages that were written with the Latin alphabet, though eventually the letter V was differentiated into U and V, and the accepted spelling of [kw] became QU.

Words spelled with Q without U are generally more recent additions to English, and often represent words borrowed from Semitic languages. Those languages are written with non-Latin alphabets and often have more than one [k]-like sound. When transliterating these scripts, K is usually used for [k], and Q for another sound such as [q], a uvular, "guttural k". In romanizations of Chinese Q is also used for a sound similar to the English "ch"."

[jno]

ah yes, Airplane Lands In Turin And Luggage In Ancona.

[Clanad]

In addition to hopkirk's list, there were these back in the day:

Aeroflot - Aeroflop
TWA - we, here in the U.S. had it as Try Walking Awhile
AA (Code for American, Alaska, Ansett) Always came out "Abort... Abort"...
Air Wisconsin (still in business) 'Ere we're crashing
Arrow Air (What else/) Error Air
Delta - Do Every Little Thing Awful
Frontier - (Sadly now one... first airline I flew for) Front & Rear
NorthWest (Now Delta North) NorthWorst
Qantas - (Previously described, but here) Quite A Nice Trip - Any Survivors?

[Hopkirk]

Love 'em, Clanad