18-06-2021, 09:53 PM
By word initial vowel I mean any vowel that’s the first letter of a word, not that the sound only appears at the beginning of words, sorry if that was unclear.
As for q, I don’t exclude the possibility it might simply be a positional variant of another character, but I don’t see what it could be. I think q is more likely to be a word, sound or symbol that is specifically added in front of words that start with vowels, and was given its own character. (Though its sound could still occur in other circumstances, just represented by a different character) Like the french “ j’ “, which only occurs at the front of vowel initial verbs, or a liaison of some kind.
As for q, I don’t exclude the possibility it might simply be a positional variant of another character, but I don’t see what it could be. I think q is more likely to be a word, sound or symbol that is specifically added in front of words that start with vowels, and was given its own character. (Though its sound could still occur in other circumstances, just represented by a different character) Like the french “ j’ “, which only occurs at the front of vowel initial verbs, or a liaison of some kind.