Re: CHAT: weird names

R G Roberts wrote:

> Re your correspondence about c / k / q?? you may or may not be interested
to know that the earliest printers setting up the type for the Welsh Bible
(and of course the Bible was always the first book to be printed everywhere in
the world) found that they didn't have enough 'k' types (because 'k' was then
relatively rare) so they used 'c' throughout even though 'k' should have been
the correct letter! Hence today 'c' is always hard and 'k' does not exist in
the alphabet!
>
> By the way, how does 'q' fit into all this?
In the Semitic languages, "Q" (which is like "k" but pronounced
farther back in the throat) was a different phoneme from "K", and so
when the Greeks adopted the Semitic alphabet, they kept the two signs
(Kappa and Qoppa).  Eventually it stopped being used, since it was not
a separate phoneme (it only appeared before O and U, I believe).

However, by that time, it had been adopted by the Romans in their
alphabet.  Unlike the Greeks, they had preserved the Indo-European
"labio-velar" stop "k-superscript w", which is a K pronounced with
rounded lips -- that is, a K and W pronounced simultaneously (as
oppoed to the current English pronunciation of "qu" where they are
pronounced sequentially).  They used the Qoppa plus a U to represent
this sound, and that is where we get our Q.

Ed Heil edheil@postmark.net
1999 World Champion
On the Edge Collectible Card Game