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I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune. And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
by boobsbr 7y ago
I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune.
And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
- schoen 7y agoThe middle consonant is a ق, which is the same consonant at the end of "Iraq", or Qur'an. There's been a tendency to write this with <q> in English more recently -- consider "Qur'an" vs. "Koran". The <k> version produces transliterations that may look more natural for English spelling, but there is another Arabic letter, ك, which is transliterated as <k>, so the <q> version helps distinguish the two.
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoThe borrowing of fakir into English is largely the result of British colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety Urdu) was an important court language in NW India, and the word would have been spelled with ق in the native script, the word had passed from Persian via Urdu to Hindustani in general, which lacks a phoneme /q/, and so its unvoiced velar stop is reflected as k in English spelling regardless.