Re: The Letter "K"

On Sunday, February 29, 2004, at 05:42 PM, Jeffrey Henning wrote:

[snip]
> Seriously, K was used in fewer than a tenth of a percent of words in a
> Latin
> dictionary I consulted (<0.1%):
>
> K, ABB.
> KADAMITAS, KADAMITATIS
[snip] ....   .........
> KATAFRACTARIUS, KATAFRACTARIA, KATAFRACTARIUM
> KATAFRACTARIUS, KATAFRACTARII
All the above (mostly snipped) are occasional spellings; usually they were
spelled with initial C.

> KL, ABB.
> KOPPA, UNDECLINED
Also spelled 'coppa' - the name of the Greek letter Q (written more like a
lollipop) - eventually discarded in the written Greek language but
retained as a numeral = 90.

> KYRIE, UNDECLINED
Well, it is the _vocative_ of Greek 'kyrios' (Lord). It was retained in
the prayer "Kyrie, eleison" (Lord, have mercy) which comes in the Mass and
elsewhere in the liturgy.

> EKTHETA, EKTHETAE
> EPINIKION, EPINIKII
Late, post-Classical borrowings from Greek.

What I find more surprising not that the Romans held onto K, but why they
used C for both /g/ and /k/ in their early writings. They later resolved
the problem by adding a small diacritic to inscriptions where C = /g/, and
thereby invented the letter G! (diacritics and an augmented Roman alphabet
are nothing new).

It would surely have been simpler to keep C = /g/ (the original value of
the latter) and extend the use of either K or Q for /k/? One has, I
suppose, to blame the Etruscans and Roman conservatism for the early use
of:
C = /k/ before /e/ ,/i/, and consonants; _and_ /g/ before anything
K = /k/ before /a/
Q = /k/ before /o/ and /u/.

Ach y fi!

Ray
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