Re: The Letter "K"

On Sunday, February 29, 2004, at 12:31 AM, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Akhilesh Pillalamarri <valardil@...>:
>
>>
>> It makes no sense the letter K is in the latin alphabet, if the original
>> "C"
>> in latin coveyed that sound. All the places i've searched said that "k"
>> was
>> used in greek words, but the romans didnt borrow "pi" to represent greek
>> words tat could otherwise be spelled with "p." I suspect tat the "k"
>> might
>> have been pronounced [x]. Does anyone know the purpose of k?
>
> There's no law of nature decreeing that letters have to have a sensible
> purpose. 'K' simply was in the set of letters the Romans adopted from the
> Etruscans, and they never came round to dropping it.
'sright - same as the Etruscans preserved letters in the alphabet, e.g. B,
  D, 0, which were not used in writing Etruscan.

> It was used in a few
> words like _kalendae_.
Even that word got spelled 'Calendae' in later times. One occasionally
came upon a 'Karthago', 'kalo' and 'kaput' for the norma' 'Carthago',
'calo' amd 'caput'. In fact it virtually died out except in abbreviations
like:
KK = caluminae causa
KK = castrorum
KS = carus suis

> Of course, many modern languages written in the Latin
> alphabet retain letters they don't much use, f'rinstance 'z' in Swedish
> and 'k' in Spanish.
Yep.

> Greek kappa seems to've been fairly consistently rendered as 'C', from
> what
> I've seen.
Drop the 'fairly'. Greek kappa was always rendered as C and khi as CH.
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On Sunday, February 29, 2004, at 02:36 AM, John Cowan wrote:

> Latin P is in fact derived from Greek pi,
Of course it is.

> in a casual writing style
> where the right-hand leg doesn't go all the way to the baseline.  When
> this style became popular in southern Italy (which was Greek-speaking),
> a stroke was added to rho to distinguish it more clearly.
The Greeks in south Italy (Magna Graecia) used _western forms of the Greek
alphabet; what eventually became _the_ standard form of the Greek alphabet
was derived from _eastern_ (Ionian) varieties. All the early Italian
versions are derived from western Greek models. The Roman P is a form of
the western 'pi'.

Ray
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