Is Latin qui a descendant or predecessor of Persian که (kë)?

Question

Backstory:

There is French "qui", whose use is alligned with Turkish "ki". As a Turk, I guessed we might have imported the word. It had been resting at the back of my mind for quite some years now.

It turns out Turkish imported the word from Persian [1] and French must have taken from Latin.

Question:

This leads to a proxy question: "Did Latin borrow/lend word 'qui' from/to Persian 'که' (kë)?".

Hopefully this does not violate the exchange rules horribly, could not find an etymology site that mentions a relation nor an etymology stackexchange.

Is " French "quis" " a reference to some Old French word I don't know about, or a mistake for the modern French "qui" ? — Evargalo, Sep 07 '23 at 14:36

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 06 '23 at 22:39

Neither is descended from the other. They're both descended from Proto-Indo-European, which had a root looking something like *kʷi- for this purpose.

You'll find similar-looking words in a lot of Indo-European languages; the main trick is that the *kʷ sound changed in many branches. In English, for example, all the descendants of this root start with "wh-" (who, what, which), while in Slavic they generally start with č. But the pattern remains!

Is Latin qui a descendant or predecessor of Persian که (kë)?

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