K (and
K) is the eleventh letter of the
basic modern Latin alphabetThe Modern basic Latin alphabet is a Latin-derived alphabet and comprises 26 letters. It is codified in ISO/IEC 646 and in the "Basic Latin" range for the Latin characters in Unicode. The upper case is at 0041-005A, lower at 0061-007A...
. Its name in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
is spelled
kay.
The letter K comes from the Greek Κ (
kappaKappa is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the voiceless velar stop, or "k", sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 20. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Kaph...
), which was taken from the
SemiticIn linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....
kapKaph is the eleventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Kaf , Arabic alphabet , Persian alphabet...
, the symbol for an open hand and also the element
PotassiumPotassium is the chemical element with the symbol K , atomic number 19, and atomic mass 39.0983. Potassium was first isolated from potash...
. This in turn was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for
"hand" representing DThe ancient Egyptian Hand is a hieroglyph with the meaning of "d"; it is also used in the word for 'hand', and actions that are performed, i.e. by the 'way of one's hands', or actions. -Iconographic usage:...
in the Egyptian word for hand,
d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.
In the earliest
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing).
K (and
K) is the eleventh letter of the
basic modern Latin alphabetThe Modern basic Latin alphabet is a Latin-derived alphabet and comprises 26 letters. It is codified in ISO/IEC 646 and in the "Basic Latin" range for the Latin characters in Unicode. The upper case is at 0041-005A, lower at 0061-007A...
. Its name in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
is spelled
kay.
History and usage
The letter K comes from the Greek Κ (
kappaKappa is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the voiceless velar stop, or "k", sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 20. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Kaph...
), which was taken from the
SemiticIn linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....
kapKaph is the eleventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Kaf , Arabic alphabet , Persian alphabet...
, the symbol for an open hand and also the element
PotassiumPotassium is the chemical element with the symbol K , atomic number 19, and atomic mass 39.0983. Potassium was first isolated from potash...
. This in turn was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for
"hand" representing DThe ancient Egyptian Hand is a hieroglyph with the meaning of "d"; it is also used in the word for 'hand', and actions that are performed, i.e. by the 'way of one's hands', or actions. -Iconographic usage:...
in the Egyptian word for hand,
d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.
In the earliest
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
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".
When Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was converted to C, with a few exceptions such as the
praenomenIn Roman naming conventions, the praenomen was the only name in which parents had some choice, roughly equivalent to the given name of today. It was a personal appellation given to a male infant on his day of lustration. As a rule only the immediate family would call a person by his praenomen...
KaesoKaeso or Caeso was an ancient but later uncommon Roman praenomen.Some of those who bore the name are:*Kaeso Fabius Vibulanus, consul 484, 481?, 479 BC*Caeso Quinctius, son of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus...
. Some words from other alphabets were also transliterated into C. Therefore, the
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
have K only in words from still other language groups. The
Celtic languagesThe Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, having much earlier been used by Greek and Roman writers to describe tribes in...
also chose C over K, and this influence carried over into Old English. Today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use hard C in addition to K (although
DutchDutch is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language, and over 5 million people as a second language.
"1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language...
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
HecateHecate or Hekate was a popular chthonian Greco-Roman goddess, often associated with magic, witches, ghosts, and crossroads. Possibly originating in the Anatolian region of Caria, she is attested in poetry as early as Hesiod's Theogony...
as "Hekate", for example. And the writing down of languages that don't 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 AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet
["The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...]
, [k] is the symbol for the
voiceless velar plosiveThe voiceless velar plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is k....
.
Several other alphabets also use characters with sharp angles to indicate the sound or syllables that start with a , for example:
ArabicThe Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world....
ك,
HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script is the better-known of two script standards used to write the...
כ (in some fonts),
KoreanHangul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logographic Sino-Korean hanja system...
ㄱ. This kind of phonetic-visual association was studied by
Wolfgang KöhlerWolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer, Fritz Perls, and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.-Early life:...
. However, there are also many examples of rounded letters for , like ค in
ThaiThe Thai alphabet is used to write the Thai language and other minority languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants , fifteen vowel symbols that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks .The character set is an abugida, a writing system in which each consonant may...
, Ք in
ArmenianThe Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian monk. Until the 19th century, Classical Armenian was the literary language; since then, the Armenian alphabet has been used to...
and C in
LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...
.
Codes for computing
In
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, the capital K is codepoint U+004B and the lower case k is U+006B.
The
ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
code for capital K is 75 and for lowercase k is 107; or in
binaryThe binary numeral system, or base-2 number system represents numeric values using two symbols, 0 and 1. More specifically, the usual base-2 system is a positional notation with a radix of 2...
01001011 and 01101011, correspondingly.
The
EBCDICExtended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE, as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS...
code for capital K is 210, and for lowercase k, 146.
The
numeric character referenceA numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...
s in
HTMLHTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images...
and
XMLXML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the produced by the W3C and several other related specifications; all are fee-free open standards....
are "
K" and "
k" for upper and lower case respectively.
"K" also covers over 30,000,000,000 English words
See also
- Ƙ (hooked K)
- К, к - Ka (Cyrillic)
- Κ, κ or ϰ - Kappa (Greek)
Kappa is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the voiceless velar stop, or "k", sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 20. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Kaph...