Re: CHAT: "Nik"names :) (was Re: Middle Initials)

John Cowan wrote:
>
> > [...] I thought about that too and figured it
> > was just because it seems more "natural" to spell final /k/ with <ck>,
>at
> > least after lax vowels. Of course there are lots of exceptions in
>English,
> > but I think most of them are loanwords, such as the very popular -ic
>
>Most of which once had -ick, as in musick, critick.  Removing this -k
>was one of the reforms Dr. Johnson made in his dictionary, on the
>grounds that k was a "Saxon" letter.
On a related note; why is it that "k" have become the standard
representation of /k/ in the Germanic and Slav languages that're written in
the Roman alphabet when the Romance languages mostly use "c", like Latin
did? Of course, English takes a sort of middle ground in that it happily
uses both "k" and "c" alot - do this have anything to do with the heavy
Romance influence on it in medieval times?

                                                  Andreas
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Reply