Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 April 21

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April 21

Why is the name Qyburn in Game of Thrones writen by Q?

Why is this name Qyburn writen by Q when it comes without a following U? Israeli Homo Sapiens (talk) 02:12, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

To make it look foreign. --Khajidha (talk) 02:59, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Like Qantas? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:34, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Probably not like Qantas, because that's actually an acronym.

To address the OP's point somewhat, 'q' is usually followed by 'u' in some languages including English, but is not in various others. Moreover, in other languages it may represent a different sound than 'qu' does in English: for example, in the romanised representation of (Modern Standard) Mandarin called Pinyin it represents the sound 'chy' ("Like punch yourself, with the lips spread wide as when one says ee. Curl the tip of the tongue downwards to stick it at the back of the teeth and strongly aspirate", to quote from our article).

Game of Thrones is set on a world completely unrelated to our own, with various different ethnicities and languages of its own (although the extingencies of casting etc. may tend to de-emphasise differences to our world). In such a world the rules of languages and spelling are determined by the writer, in this case George R. R. Martin on whose novels the TV series is based and who named the character, and he may have specified his reason for this particular name and spelling – you might try searching his website or blog, or even ask him directly on the latter. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.2.132 (talk) 06:44, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't watch the show. How is it pronounced? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:09, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

In the TV show they're usually just pronounced with our usual inventory of English sounds, so Qyburn is pronounced Kyburn. How about Jaqen H'ghar? Seems like it should be unpronounceable in English but they make it work. The characters speaking Dothraki and the other invented languages usually seem to put more of an effort into making non-English sounds. Adam Bishop (talk) 15:32, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Reminiscent of Tyburn? Alansplodge (talk) 22:22, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

See List of English words containing Q not followed by U. The text notes that only 3 of the 71 entries contained in the list are modern English words not borrowed from another language: qiana, qwerty and tranq. And then, the former two are 20th-century neologisms (qiana is "a computerized combination of random letters", and qwerty reflects the order of the keys in the keyboard layout), while tranq is an apocope of tranquilizer. There are also a few obsolete ones such as qhat ("what") and qheche ("which"), and it is noted that they're likely of Scots origin, because an old Scots spelling convention used "quh-" or "qh-" where English had "wh-". The vast majority are loanwords from languages where Q doesn't have to be followed by U. These are languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, Inuktitut, Fijian, Zulu, Albanian, and even French (coq, cinq). --Theurgist (talk) 23:26, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn't even call most of those "loanwords". We really only use most of those words when discussing the culture the word originates from. For example, we don't talk about "taluqs" outside of India. On the other hand, we do speak of "pajamas" (also borrowed from Hindustani) outside an Indian context. Some of the others are more or less obsolete spellings as far as English is concerned. I have never seen "qabab" or "sheqel" in print, but I have seen "kebab" and "shekel".--Khajidha (talk) 18:42, 24 April 2019 (UTC)