Re: C (was: Acadon (was: Lingwa de Planeta))

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> T. A. McLeay writes:
>> ...
>> Any case, the actual usual suspect for English orthography being
>> different from German, is that the English orthography has always been a
>> separate tradition.
>> ...
>
> When writing |k| in Germanic goes back to quite early times (say in
> Old Norse), to starting using the Latin alphabet at all, where is the
> branching in English tradition?
Precisely.

> In any case, would you think a romance conlang could simply have a
> different tradition from other romlangs of prefering |k| over |c|?  I
> would be easy off with a conexplanation like this: 'it is just that
> early scholars seemed to like |k| more than |c| in Terkunan.'
Well, that's always a good reason --- depending on the conhistory (and
the accuracy of mine!), you might say something like:

After Charlemagne's reforms (I think it was under his watch) to the
pronunciation of Latin to better follow the spelling spread to
"Terkunia", the use of a palatalised reading of "c" before front vowels
became standard when reading Latin. Seeing as the scribes who first
wrote Terkunan as Terkunan were familiar with the letter "k" only as
/k/, it seemed entirely logical to use it.

If you retain /kw/ (or turn it into something other than /k/), all the
more reason not to use "qu". Romanian only uses ch=k under the
deliberate influence of Italian, so if you're no-where near Italy (or if
Italy *there* is sufficiently different from Italy *here*), I'd say
that's practically out of the question.

But --- my knowledge of Terkunan is limited to these three posts of
yours, and my knowledge of Romance history is only as good as any
conlanger's...

--
Tristan.

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