Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/844

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 THE letter K has remained with singularly little change in form even from the 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, which is sonant; and it has this value and no other in all modern s in which it is found. In many s, however, it is supplanted wholly or to a great extent by the symbol. The reason of this has been already explained under the letters and. The substitution of for K took place in ,—the original character surviving only in a few well-understood s; and in consequence of this those s which have been derived from  naturally have the ; while those derived directly from the Greek, e.g., the Gothic, which came through, and the different s which trace back to  (see ), 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 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  was introduced by missionaries into, and therefore the oldest English (or Anglo-Saxon) writings regularly have  and not K. The letter was introduced probably first in words borrowed from the German (thus in Alfred&rsquo;s version of Gregory&rsquo;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, 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 if K could have been kept as the sole symbol for the pure sound and  as the symbol for a common corruption of it, now to be described.

This corruption is due to ; the middle instead of the back of the is raised against the, and the result is the difference of sound between, e.g., “kirk” and “church.” This corruption was common in, and a special symbol was assigned to the sound. It is found in late, especially before an '; and so it passed into Italian, where ' is regularly sounded as our ch before ' and '; 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 ' passed into the sh-sound (denoted by ch) before ', 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 ' and ' the sound underwent a still greater change; it sank into the simple , e.g., “civitas”—pronounced in  “kīvitas”—became “cité,” whence our own sound; “certus” became “certein.” In English,  has been very extensive; thus Old English “cese” (sounded like German “käse”) became “cheese,” “cild” became “child,” &c.; here ic variation may often be seen, e.g., in  but ,  but.

Another still greater change of K has been called “”: this is the passage of the k-sound through an intermediate k into '. This was common in Greek, where, e.g., we find ἕπομαι, τρέπω, of which the root form as shown by other languages was wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sekʷ-, wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/trep-; in we have the transitional forms “sequ-or,” “torqu-eo”; in the Italian dialects the change was complete, e.g., Oscan “pid” corresponded to “quid,” and Umbrian “pumpe” to “quomque.” This change arose from a slight rounding of the  while the speech-organs were in the position for k-sound; this produced a more or less distinct k according to the amount of the rounding, passing finally into ', when the rounding amounted to absolute closing of the. For the intermediate sound the employed the symbol, which is a slightly turned form of the original Ϙ  taken by the  from the, but not required by them, and therefore suffered to fall out except in ; the  took it on, and, if it had consistently employed it alone to denote the slightly  k, the result would have been good; but it regularly added  to it , so that the  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 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 ' 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, κ or π in Greek, ' or in, k in Lithuanian and Sclavonic; in another set we find ç in , sz (which is our sh-sound) in Lithuanian, s in Slavonic, but only k in Greek and c in ; that is, in one set we see the phenomenon of , in the other  but no touch of ; from which we infer that the  k in the derived languages traces back to k pure, the  k to a sound which in the original language was at least slightly modified from k. An instance of the  may be seen in the correspondence of  “çatam,” Lithuanian “szimtas,” to  “centum,” Greek ἑκατόν; neither in  nor in  is there any  form of this word.  KAABA,, or, the sacred of , containing the “black stone,” in the middle of the great at. See, , and.  KAADEN, chief of a in the circle of,, is situated on the , about 60 s north-west of. The lies about 2 s E. of the station of Kaaden-, on the  between  and, and consists of an old , surrounded by a , and two. It contains two s, a, and a  of. The chief s are the Late Gothic, and the town-house with a noteworthy. The s include and -root ; there is some  in  and ; and  for  and a , yielding Kaaden-green, is carried on in the neighbourhood. Kaaden was founded about ; in it became a free ; and in  it saw the conclusion of a peace between, , and ,  of. The in  was 5057.  KABBALAH is now used as the technical name for the system of which began to be developed among the  in the, and which has also played an important part in the  since the Middle