It was a circle with a line running down through it and on down: a monkey with its tail, or a ball of wool? Those who say that this letter was a ball of wool say that it was inspired by an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph. The ancient Greeks adopted it around 800 BCE calling it ‘qoppa’. Whereas the Phoenicians distinguished between the ‘k’ of their ‘kaph’ and the ‘q’ of their ‘qoph’, the Greeks did not, and so they dropped ‘qoppa’. But the Etruscans, with their long-standing connections to Greece, adopted it, kept it and passed it on to the Romans with a pronunciation more like ‘kw’. A recognizable ‘Q’ appears in Roman inscriptions as early as 520 BCE. It was the Romans who seemed to have invented the first form of the ‘“u” after “q”’ rule. It was needed whenever the ‘q’ sound came before a vowel even if that vowel was ‘u’ as in the famous ‘equus’. Amongst the various struggles that took place between the Germanic settlers of Britain and the Romance-language-speaking Normans, one was over the ‘kw’ sound.
