K

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For other uses of "K", see K (disambiguation).
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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 is the eleventh letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay (pronounced /keɪ/).[1]

Contents

[edit] History and usage

Egyptian hieroglyph D Proto-Semitic K Phoenician K Etruscan K Greek Kappa
d
Image:Proto-semiticK-01.png Image:PhoenicianK-01.png Image:EtruscanK-01.png

The letter K comes from the Greek Κ (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]

The Semitic value of /k/ was maintained in most classical as well as modern languages, although Latin abandoned the use of K almost completely, preferring C. When Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was converted to C, with a few exceptions such as the term kalendae (calends) and the praenomen Kaeso.[2] Some words from other alphabets were also transliterated into C. Therefore, the Romance languages have K only in words from still 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 C in addition to K (although Dutch uses 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 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 Alphabet, [k] is the symbol for the voiceless velar plosive.

Several other alphabets also use characters with sharp angles to indicate the sound /k/ or syllables that start with a /k/, for example: Arabic ك, Hebrew כ (in some fonts), 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 ค in Thai and Ք in Armenian.

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of K
NATO phonetic Morse code
Kilo –·–
⠅
Signal flag Flag semaphore ASL Manual Braille

In Unicode the capital K is codepoint U+004B and the lower case k is U+006B.

The ASCII code for capital K is 75 and for lowercase k is 107; or in binary 01001011 and 01101011, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital K is 210, and for lowercase k, 146.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "K" and "k" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] 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 [1]
  3. ^ Cyrus H. Gordon: The Accidental Invention of the Phonemic Alphabet

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
  • Ƙ (hooked K)
  • К, the Cyrillic letter ka
The ISO 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
Letter K with diacritics

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters