K

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd    
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn
Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt
Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

K ( /ˈkeɪ/; named kay)[1] is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents

History and usage

In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by /k/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA.

Egyptian hieroglyph D Proto-Semitic K Phoenician
kaph		 Etruscan K Greek
Kappa

The letter K comes from the Greek letter K(kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand.[2] This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing D in the Egyptian word for hand, d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.[3] In modern-day English slang, the word "k" is used as a substitute for the abbreviation "O.K.", or "Okay." In International Morse code it is used to mean "over".[4]

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel, K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q. K survived only in a few fossilized forms such as Kalendae, "the calends".[5]

When Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was changed to C, with a few exceptions such as the praenomen Kaeso.[2] Some words from other alphabets were also transliterated into C. Hence, the Romance languages have K only in words from other language groups. The Celtic languages also chose C over K, and this influence carried over into Old English. Today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use hard T in addition to K (though Dutch use it in learned words of Latin origin and follows the same "hard / soft" distinction in such words as does French and English – but not in native words).

Some English linguists prefer to reverse the Latin transliteration process for proper names in Greek, spelling Hecate as "Hekate", for example. And the writing down of languages that do not have their own alphabet with the Latin one has resulted in a standardization of the letter for this sound, as in Kwakiutl.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [k] is the symbol for the voiceless velar plosive.

Several other alphabets use characters with sharp angles to indicate the sound /k/ or syllables that start with a /k/, for example: Arabic ك, Hebrew כ or ק, Korean ㄱ. This kind of phonetic-visual association was studied by Wolfgang Köhler. However, there are also many examples of rounded letters for /k/, like క in Telugu, ก and ค in Thai, Ք in Armenian, ክ in Geez, and C in Latin.

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

character K k
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K

LATIN SMALL LETTER K
character encoding decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 75 004B 107 006B
UTF-8 75 4B 107 6B
Numeric character reference K K k k
EBCDIC family 210 D2 146 92
ASCII 1 75 4B 107 6B

1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic Morse code
Kilo –·–
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "K" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "kay," op. cit.
  2. ^ a b "K". The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, online
  3. ^ Cyrus H. Gordon: The Accidental Invention of the Phonemic Alphabet
  4. ^ Stephen Phillips (2009-06-04). "International Morse Code". http://morsecode.scphillips.com/morse.html. 
  5. ^ Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (illustrated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 21. ISBN 0195083458. http://books.google.com/books?id=IeHmqKY2BqoC. 

External links

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter K with diacritics
Ḱḱ Ǩǩ Ķķ Ḳḳ Ḵḵ Ƙƙ Ⱪⱪ ᶄ Ꝁꝁ
Related