From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 09:26:16 EST
Patrick Andries writes:
> De: "Don Osborn" <dzo@bisharat.net>
> > Although I admit to not quite understanding the motivation for this
> > suggestion,
>
> Request by 22 MPs that want to modify the English spelling by law.
Note that french has always written "Corée (la République de)": words that
start by a "K" or contain a "k" are extremely rare in french.
Almost all (if not all) french words with a "k" are imported from foreign
orthographs, such as "koala (un)" (the small animal), "rack (un)" or "break
(un)" or "week-end (un)" (imported from english), "kurde" or "Kurdistan"
(transliteration from Arabic script, and similar phonetics).
It's simply because french does not mark the difference of pronunciation
between "c" and "k" (and uses instead the "ch" digraph to mark the greek
letter khi, or "qu" to mark the Arabic "q"). There's no tradition in French
for East-Asian languages, so they are written with the common french
orthograph based or Latin or Greek radicals.
I'm curious to know more about the history of "k" in English. I think it may
have been imported from Nordic languages which had some common history with
Uralic languages (which have spread in Eastern Europe from Finland to
Hungria, and may persist today within minority languages of Southern Russia
or in Siberia where Uralic peoples have been deported by Staline). Am I
wrong here?
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