Probably a stupid question, but I'm genuinely curious. How in tf did the letter <q> manage to survive for so long in most European orthographies? As far as I'm aware, <q> represented a separate phoneme from /k/ only in Old Latin (meaning that even since freaking Classical Latin <c> and <q> represented the same phoneme). How is that nobody in two millennia thought that the grapheme is totally redundant and unnecessary? I guess it makes some sense in Spanish and French because it's the main way to represent /k/ in front of front vowels (e.g. <que> --> /ke/), but in Italian it's just randomly used in some words instead of <c> before /u/ (e.g. quota, quando BUT cuoco, scuola), and Germanic languages (and I think also some Slavic ones use <q>) definitely have no use of such a letter.