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

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> French.  The usual suspect when you ask "why is English more
> romlangish than germanicish in instance X?" :)
Actually, this English tradition goes back well before the Norman
invasion. Old English used <c> for /k/ almost exclusively, even when
this could cause confusion with /c/. Words in modern english with
k+front vowel come either from OE words with front rounded vowels (e.g.
kin < cyn) or ON borrowings/influence. (OE /2(:)/ had already been
unrounded to /e(:)/ by the time the latin orthography was used, and so
"keep" < _cepan_ vs "cheese" < _cese_ shows ambiguity of ce:-. In any
case, the fact that OE generally had a /c~k/ alternation made "c" a
better letter to have picked from a modern perspective at least---we
don't need any weird Norwegian-style spelling-/c~k/-as-<k> behavior here!

OE Alphabet, for the record (and, tmk, in alphabetical order):
a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u x y wynn thorn eth ash
(sorry, I can't type the last characters on this Windows dvorak keyboard)

K and Q, as Latin letters, were of course included in the full alphabet
but not used in native words.

The letter Yogh was a ME development, deriving from the OE shape of the
letter g. But in OE, there was only one character --- so we should type
in unicode "g". Other significant graphic differences: i was dotless,
but y was dotted, r looked like a cursive p, f was shifted downed, s was
always like a shifted-down long s (or barless OE f) --- even at the end
of a word. You can get a rough indication of the glyphs used from the
the page at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm but the
glyphs they use are very modernised. The middle section of this document
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Aethelred_charter_Aethelred_1003.jpg
is in Old English, and gives a much better impression --- notice the way
Latin was written with a different handwriting than OE!

Any case, the actual usual suspect for English orthography being
different from German, is that the English orthography has always been a
separate tradition.

> On 8/6/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> R A Brown writes:
>>> ...
>>> In fact since Sardinian (like Terkunan) did not share in the
>>> palatalization which afflicted Vulgar Lain elsewhere, it would be more
>>> logical for Sardinian to retain the old Latin spelling with |c| = /k/ in
>>> all environments.
>>> ...
>> You do have a point here.  Quite an obvious one, and I did not give it
>> enough though I think.  For Sardinian, I suppose current writing is
>> almost completely based on Italian for obvious reasons.  But Terkunan
>> is meant to be a major language of a state (with an army) in a
>> parallel universe so I should come up with a good explanation for
>> the |k|.  Maybe being the only non-palatalising romlang in that
>> universe would be enough, but maybe not.
>>
>> Why does English use 'c' where German uses 'k'?  Say, 'cat'
>> vs. 'Katze'?  French?
>>
>> **Henrik
>>
>
>

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