Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/K

K. THE letter K has remained with singularly little change in form even from the Phœnician alphabet down to the present time. It represents the guttural momentary sound produced by raising the back of the tongue to the back of the palate; it is surd, corresponding to G, which is sonant; and it has this value and no other in all modern alphabets in which it is found. In many alphabets, however, it is supplanted wholly or to a great extent by the symbol C. The reason of this has been already explained under the letters C and G. The substitution of C for K took place in Italy,—the original character surviving only in a few well-understood abbreviations; and in consequence of this those alphabets which have been derived from Italy naturally have the C; while those derived directly from the Greek, e.g., the Gothic, which came through Ulfilas, and the different alphabets which trace back to Cyril (see Alphabet), have only the K. In German we find K, with the exception of some words borrowed from other languages, e.g., Cabinet, Cardinal, Caprice, &c.; but even foreign words when thoroughly naturalized take the German spelling, e.g., Karte, Kammer, Onkel, &c. In French, on the other hand, K is found only in a few foreign words, and even these are merely names of men or countries. In England the large admixture of French words in the Teutonic language has produced some irregularity in spelling; but the K is not found (as might have been expected) in the Teutonic words, because the Roman alphabet was introduced by missionaries into England, and therefore the oldest English (or Anglo-Saxon) writings regularly have C and not K. The letter was introduced probably first in words borrowed from the German (thus in Alfred’s version of Gregory’s Pastoral we find “kycglum” (p. 297, l. 1, ed. Sweet), the dative of the German “Kugel”), or through German influence, as for example in the Blickling Homilies of the 10th century, we find “kyning” (p. 163, l. 23, ed. Morris) beside the much more common “cyning.” It would have been very convenient both in English and in other languages of modern Europe if K could have been kept as the sole symbol for the pure sound and C as the symbol for a common corruption of it, now to be described.

This corruption is due to palatization; the middle instead of the back of the tongue is raised against the palate, and the result is the difference of sound between, e.g., “kirk” and “church.” This corruption was common in Sanskrit, and a special symbol was assigned to the sound. It is found in late Latin, especially before an i; and so it passed into Italian, where c is regularly sounded as our ch before e and i; in the words where the sound remained unchanged the symbol ch is employed to represent it, e.g., in “che.” In French the change was much greater; here c passed into the sh-sound (denoted by ch) before a, e.g., in “chambre” from “camera,” “chaud” from “calidus”; observe that the symbol ch has just the opposite value to the Italian one; while before e and i the sound underwent a still greater change; it sank into the simple sibilant s, e.g., “civitas”—pronounced in Latin “kīvitas”—became “cité,” whence our own sound; “certus” became “certein.” In English, palatization has been very extensive; thus Old English “cese” (sounded like German “käse”) became “cheese,” “cild” became “child,” &c.; here dialectic variation may often be seen, e.g., in Alnwick but Norwich, Caistor but Chester.

Another still greater change of K has been called “labialization”: this is the passage of the k-sound through an intermediate kw into p. This was common in Greek, where, e.g., we find ἕπομαι, τρέπω, of which the root form as shown by other languages was sak, tark; in Latin we have the transitional forms “sequ-or,” “torqu-eo”; in the Italian dialects the change was complete, e.g., Oscan “pid” corresponded to Latin “quid,” and Umbrian “pumpe” to “quomque.” This change arose from a slight rounding of the lips while the speech-organs were in the position for k-sound; this produced a more or less distinct kw according to the amount of the rounding, passing finally into p, when the rounding amounted to absolute closing of the lips. For the intermediate sound the Latin employed the symbol Q, which is a slightly turned form of the original Ϙ (Koppa) taken by the Greeks from the Phœnician, but not required by them, and therefore suffered to fall out except in numeration; the Latin took it on, and, if it had consistently employed it alone to denote the slightly labialized k, the result would have been good; but it regularly added u to it (QU), so that the Q might as well have been written K. The superfluous letter passed on to the French and English languages.

There is reason for believing that this labializing tendency is very old,—as old indeed as the Indo-European language itself. It is probable that that language had both the k pure and another with a slight w sound following it. This appears from the fact (first thoroughly ascertained by Fick) that in one set of cognate words which had an original k, we find ch in Sanskrit, κ or π in Greek, c or qu in Latin, k in Lithuanian and Sclavonic; in another set we find ç in Sanskrit, sz (which is our sh-sound) in Lithuanian, s in Slavonic, but only k in Greek and c in Latin; that is, in one set we see the phenomenon of labialism, in the other assibilation but no touch of labialism; from which we infer that the assibilated k in the derived languages traces back to k pure, the labialized k to a sound which in the original language was at least slightly modified from k. An instance of the assibilation may be seen in the correspondence of Sanskrit “çatam,” Lithuanian “szimtas,” to Latin “centum,” Greek ἑκατόν; neither in Greece nor in Italy is there any labialized form of this word.