Honestly, why did they remove letter K from the alphabet?
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1 Answer
It was redundant with C. They indicated the same sound, and C was vastly more common, so K was lost.
answered Nov 6, 2022 at 21:14
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6That’s part of it, and there was a deliberate effort to get rid of <k> because it represented the same sound as <c>, but it remained in standard use for a long time, up until at least the mid-16th century, particularly word-initially. The beginning to really killing it was William Salesbury’s Welsh edition of the New Testament (1567), which used <c> throughout, and that was for practical reasons: in the early days of printing, most Welsh-language material was printed in England, and English printers had typekits with letter frequencies for English and Latin, so they didn’t have enough k’s. Nov 6, 2022 at 22:01
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3@AkshatGoswami I mean, I don't speak Welsh, so how Welsh is written shouldn't be up to me. The writing system should ideally belong to the native speakers.– Draconis ♦Nov 6, 2022 at 23:22
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1@JanusBahsJacquet That's actually very interesting, I didn't know that. Feel free to add another answer with that and I'll upvote it.– Draconis ♦Nov 6, 2022 at 23:22
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3We're finding out nowadays what it actually means to have the writing system up to the native speakers. Take a look at the actual orthographies adopted by (e.g,) Coast Salishan languages, now that printing is cheap. All Salishan languages are closely related; much closer than I-E. And their phonologies are close to identical. But no two languages have the same set of symbols or the same spelling conventions. Some are like English; some introduce IPA symbols; some introduce other strange symbols; and there's no consistency overall. Amazing.– jlawlerNov 7, 2022 at 4:04