Hello,
I find from time to time references to the word quă, but I find only grammatical information about it, not really about its exact meaning nor examples of use. It’s supposed to be a special form of quae, but that’s almost it.
Do you have any information you can share about it?
I think that most, if not all, of what you need to know is here https://logeion.uchicago.edu/qua
Did you mean to place a breve over the a? Or did you actually want quā?
It is really quă, not quā. It’s a variant of quae, without the -e enclitic, and as such a nominative.
Unfortunately, it’s almost all about quā, not quă.
On the Wiktionary, I find:
“When used as an indefinite word (pronoun or adjective), the feminine nominative singular and neuter nominative/accusative plural is usually qua (with short ă) instead of quae. Indefinite quă is generally only found directly after sī, nisi, num, or nē and may be considered to be either enclitic to the preceding word or (in Priscian’s view) forming a compound with it; accordingly, sīqua, numqua, and nēqua are sometimes written together (as also are the masculines sīquis, numquis, and nēquis). The form quă is never used for the feminine plural, nor for any form of the relative pronoun or of the interrogative pronoun or adjective.”
But that doesn’t help me much.
I really need to tell quă from quã in texts where macrons aren’t written, and so it’s necessary to understand what is quă.
Well, I would be surprised to find a single classical author using it.
Well, the OLD quotes ubi concepit autem aliqua (fem.nom.) from Celsus, and perit aliqua cum viro from Seneca, both these obviously strongly gendered, while Propertius uses aliquis for the feminine, which is not very surprising. And quă is routinely found after si etc., e.g. Propertius’ cocksure sic hodie veniet, si qua negavit heri.
I shouldn’t think there’s ever much difficulty in telling quă from quā when reading texts. It’s usually easy enough to distinguish nominative from ablative, simply from the immediate environment, just as it is with nouns (puella etc.).
What the Romans sometimes found tricky was quă versus quae as indefinite pronoun.
Telling ablative from nominative is generally easy, but some words way be used in a way so that it may be difficult to tell. I obviously have no example, and explaining it is beyond my English and grammatical possibilities but I imagined it could be used without verb, right in the middle of a sentence, without clear indication to tell the nominative from the ablative in this context. But maybe I’m overthinking.
The important part in the Wiktionary entry you quoted, which you might have missed, is that quă is “only found directly after si, num, nisi, or ne”. This makes it quite easy to distinguish from quā in practice.
Look at this example from Cicero’s In Verrem 2, where “qua civitas” stands for “aliqua civitas” and “qua natio” for “aliqua natio”:
Si qui rex, si qua civitas exterarum gentium, si qua natio fecisset aliquid in civis Romanos eius modi, nonne publice vindicaremus, nonne bello persequeremur?
Like Catullus? Si qua recordanti…
I think most of us learn it as aliqua without ali-, but is that actually right? I don’t know. It’s effectively the same, though.
The aliqua thing is interesting, because I find on the aliqua article “After sī, nisi, num, and nē, ali- falls away; see quis.”
I’m used to quis instead of aliquis, so if quă is for aliqua, it definitely makes sense. It’s just that I’m not totally used yet to aliqua due to lack of enough reading.
Thanks for your answers, now I get it. 