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Re: The Letter "K"

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Monday, March 1, 2004, 6:38
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. ========================================================================= ==================== 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 =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760