This Essay is Brought to You by the Letter Q

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There are Star Trek fans, and then there are Star Trek fans. Among the show’s many devotees, Janet Quarton stands out as one of the all-time greats. In the ’70s, when the Star Trek Action Group fan club was fundraising for the U.K.’s first-ever Trekkie convention, Janet Quarton was there. She became the second president of the club, and eventually Gene Roddenberry himself, creator of the franchise, started consulting her opinion on his creative choices. Roddenberry’s authorized biography is full of long excerpts from his letters to Quarton, deliberating about costume designs and movie scripts.

By 1987, when Roddenberry launched Star Trek’s definitive series—The Next Generation—Quarton meant so much to him that he named a super-powered trans-dimensional alien after her. TNG opens with an iconic confrontation between Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and John de Lancie as an enigmatic space imp named Q. The “Q” stands for Quarton.

All Q’s appearances are full of that delightfully camp Star Trek whimsy, but his most consequential intervention turned out to be in Season 2, Episode 16 (“Q Who”). That’s when he chastised Picard for his arrogance by sending his ship skittering off course to meet with a hideous nemesis, the Borg. The trajectory of all Star Trek properties ever after was changed because of this mischievous intervention by a godlike jester named after Janet Q, the superfan from England.

Specifically, her family must have come from a place called Wharton, which is the original source of the surname Quarton. You’ll notice there’s no Q in Wharton—it emerges gradually from people hitting the WH- sound harder and harder, a little like Stewie Griffin saying “Cool HWHip” on Family Guy. Do this with the name “Wharton,” and you’ll eventually get a hard consonant at the back of your throat that sounds a bit like “Quarton.” This is one of the specific sounds that Q, in modern English, can make.

It’s not a sound with a lot of native uses in Old English. The Anglo-Saxons who spoke the earliest form of this language tended to use other letter combinations, like WH, for their own words. They reserved Q for foreign words, especially words in Latin. These started pouring in thick and fast, via French, after the Norman invasion of 1066 set in motion the process that would turn Old English into Middle English. In the Sesame Street episode brought to you by the letter Q, many of the words the kids come up with are originally from Latin, not Anglo-Saxon: quiet, quart, quit, quarter.

There are lots of exceptions to this: quick, queen, and quake all come from Old English. But the Anglo-Saxons wrote them cwic, cwen, and cwacian. They thought of the letter Q as a Latin import. And indeed it was. So was the rest of the alphabet, for that matter, but the letter Q especially. Avenue Q, the raunchy but good-natured musical satire of Sesame Street from the early aughts, may take place in a multiethnic New York borough. But the letter Q itself is the product of one very specific European subculture: the Euboeans.

Euboea is a sizable Greek island; it was a major regional power until the Persians crippled it in the early 5th century B.C. Some time before then, the Euboeans set up a colony in Cumae, on Italy’s western shore. That’s where Aeneas, in Virgil’s famous epic of Rome’s founding, meets the prophetic sibyl who points the way forward. “She sings of fate and writes on leaves,” says one character, describing the Sibyl’s method of writing down her cryptic visions and letting the breeze carry off whichever parts are destined to be scrambled by fate.

The alphabet she used for this nerve-wracking practice would have come from the Euboean variant of Greek, which contained a letter not found in other dialects: qoppa, written ϙ and pronounced something like “kh” (Cool KWHip...). The Euboeans passed on qoppa to the Etruscans, who gave it to the Romans, and that is why our alphabet—the Latin alphabet—has a Q. The Romans always combined it with their letter U, which is why we do too, and why it came to replace the cw combinations in Old English: it’s a different sound than just “C,” slightly further back in the throat. You can see its predecessor qoppa just faintly, upside down, on the top right of this early pottery found in Rome.

So the sibyl, like Virgil, wrote with Qs. And like Virgil, she left her work tantalizingly unfinished. In Roman mythology, the sybil was always recklessly destroying portions of her prophecies, burning whole books of them or casting them maniacally to the winds. It’s an eerie image of how even precious words get scattered, scrambled, lost to chance. Things we would very much like to know get incinerated in library fires or buried under piles of volcanic ash.

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms,” says the wise tutor in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Who knows what star charts were tucked away in King Ashurbanipal’s Assyrian library that Galileo could have used? Entire schools of thought have been buried, uncovered, blitzed from existence and reinvented, all across the many generations of men.

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The letter Q wasn’t lost to time, exactly, but it was gradually phased out of Greek. The Euboeans’ version of the alphabet lived on in Latin, but it wasn’t the one that became standard for the Greeks themselves. Qoppa in particular looked too much like the letter phi, a symbol that now stands in for the slippery wave functions of quantum mechanics: φ. The Greeks used that symbol for their ph sound, and kappa (κ) for their k sounds. They couldn’t use ϙ too without confusion, especially since qoppa probably came from the same source as phi: the Phoenician letter qoph.

The Phoenicians were swashbuckling traders who spread their alphabet around the Mediterranean. Dido, the poor doomed queen Aeneas loved, was descended from the Phoenicians, as was the real empire of Carthage that she represented. But long before all that—before 1000 B.C.—they distributed the alphabet that would give birth to the writing systems used for Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Germanic Runestones, English, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew. Here it is on some arrowheads:

It may not look like much, but this alphabet is the reason why Hebrew, as well as English and Latin, has a Q. Hebrew’s version is called “qof,” written ק, and derived from the same shape that gave us φ in Greek, Q in Latin, and ق‎ in Arabic. You have to go five verses into the Bible before you get to a Q, but then it makes a characteristically bold entrance: וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם, “and god called (yi-Q’ra’) the light day.”

He also lit the night with the moon. In gematria, the ancient Jewish practice of reading symbols in the numbers connected to letters, qof is a moon-letter, a sign of cycles and transitions on the borderland between life and death. It’s the 19th letter of the alphabet, and 19 years is how long it takes for the moon to complete a “metonic cycle” (or an enneadecaeteris, a “nineteen-yearer”), after which the moon’s phases recur at the same time of the year as they did 19 years ago. Qof in Hebrew also means “monkey,” the creature that stands on the borderline between animals and humans.

And this is where things get really interesting.