# .font: font.text_2
2023-02-07 17:03 dustin  
# .font: font.text_1
while digging and blasting his way through the next nhistoric cave, ^ admires lots of different forms which the letter "k" had in its past!  
  
history of the letter "k":  
  
| the root was likely the egyptian hieroglyph for a hand ("darat") which was spoken like [d]. see the ΔΔΔ shape in the top half of the cave.  
  
| already for the proto-sinaitic script, the hieroglyph changed its form remarkably. it now showed the palm of the hand, (see bottom-left shape). the sound was changed into [k] (as in "key") because the semitic word for "hand" started with [k].  
  
| for the first time in this series, i'm also mentioning and showing the proto-canaanite version of the letter because they again changed the form remarkably, rotating it by 90 degrees counter-clockwise and deleting one line (bottom-middle shape). this letter now looked like a reverse "euro" sign and was called "kap".  
  
| the phoenicians were obviously still unsatisfied with the form of the letter and turned the horizontal line into a vertical one (see bottom-right shape). this "kaph" became the 11th letter of their alphabet.  
  
| the greeks adopted the letter without any changes and called it "kappa". later on, the letter was mirrored because the writing direction changed from right-to-left to left-to-right. no further changes by the etruscians and romans.  
  
i already mentioned earlier in the series that and why the romans had a redundant set of three letters (c, k and q) for only one sound [k] (see "c for stick" for more details). their main letter for that sound became "c", and that's why they used the letters "k" and "q" so rarely, which is still the case in many latin-based languages today! (for example, "k" is the fifth-rarest and "q" the second-rarest letter in english.)  
  
cave difficulty: 6/10