Re: Korea, Corea, (chorea?), Corée & the history of K

Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> To differentiate the two sounds, a diacritic bar was added letter to
> indicate the second one, which gave our <G>.

In the -3rd century by Spurius Corvilius Ruga, who obviously got tired of
explaining to the students in his school how his name was pronounced, given
that it was spelled RVCA.

> The new letter was placed on the 7th slot in the alphabet order, in place of
> letter <Z> which was at that time useless in Latin.

It was important not to disturb the letter-to-number mapping, so that H would
remain mapped to 8.

> Through
> loanwords, the "soft" pronunciation of <C> and <G> also entered Germanic
> languages, hence the initial [s] or [ts] sound of English "center", German
> "Zentrum" (or "Centrum"), etc.

Only partly true in English, as many native words underwent exactly the same
change already in Old English times. Orthographically, K was not
introduced into English writing until Middle English.

--
John Cowan jcowan@... www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan
I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them
alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag
went over me. I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am
Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider. --Bilbo to Smaug