As I am sure you are aware, we can thank the ancient Romans for our (Western) alphabet.
But why do we have C, K and Q?
They all literally have the exact same sound.
(Q is included because it gets its ‘W’ sound only from the U that follows [think of the word ‘Iraq’].)
The history of the alphabet is quite complicated and various cultures repurposed letters as it suited them.
Did you know that F, V, U, W, and Y all originated as forms of a single Greek letter that the Greeks themselves discarded early on.
The Greeks inherited an alphabet with no letters assigned to vowel phonemes, so they repurposed several of them.
When the Latins learned the alphabet from the Etruscans, they used C (developed from Greek Γ) for both /k/ and /g/ phonemes, casting K aside for the most part. They kept QU for the /kw/ combination, but otherwise, ignored Q.
Eventually, the Romans decided they needed to distinguish /k/ and /g/ in writing and split C into C and G.
The process of palatalization morphed the pronunciation of C in languages that leaned the alphabet from the Romans, so now it might not only stand for /k/, but also /ç/, /ʃ/, /ts/, /tɕ/, /tʃ/, and /s/.
English originally didn’t use K, using C only for /k/
This was the original English alphabet
A Æ B C D Ð E F Ᵹ/G H I L M N O P R S T Þ U Ƿ X Y
F had two allophones: /f/ and /v/
S had two allophones: /s/ and /z/
Ƿ was for /w/—W hadn’t been invented yet
Ð and Þ were for /ð/ and /θ/ as in “this thing.”
Æ was for a low front in rounded vowel that we now mostly treat as /æ/
H and G had several allophones each.
The Old Latin alphabet was
A B C D E F H I (K) L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
U was a stylistic variation of V. It wasn’t until centuries later that they were completely split. W was split off from U/V around the same time. J was a stylistic variation of I invented in the Middle Ages and not firmly established as a separate letter in English until the late 18th century.
The first response is excellent.
Letter don’t have sounds. They loosely represent phonemes. But how we pronounce words changes, and we often don’t change spelling to go along with it. And we borrow words from other languages that have changed in different ways.
And Latin mostly doesn’t use K at all-- Only occasionally in a Greek loan word, and even with those, the Romans mostly replaced the kappa with c (such as kalends → calends).
Actually, that’s two letters too long. Y and Z were not in the original Latin alphabet, but rather borrowed later to spell Greek words.
The thing I can’t figure out is K. Latin didn’t use it, as Chronos points out, so why is it in our alphabet at all? And if borrowed to spell Greek words, why is it in the middle instead of at the end like Y and Z?
Teaches me to rely only on my memory.
The modern English alphabet and its order largely came from the Norman French. That’s why English lost Ƿ Ð Þ Æ
I would guess that the Norman scribes inserted K and Q and W and Z in their current spots.
That’s a shame. It’s frustrating that we don’t have a letter for either “th” sound.
And, of course, Kronos → Chronos. You of all people should have remembered that.
d + r
In English. The alphabet wasn’t invented by English-speaking people.
Nor was it invented by the Romans or even the Greeks. If you put the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and ancient Phoenician alphabets side-by-side, you will notice that they are largely the same. The shapes of some of the letters differ (Hebrew and Phoenician are especially different-looking than Latin and Greek), but there are a lot of corresponding letters in roughly the same order.
This is a WAG, but I think that Caxton must be responsible for many of the changes. For example, the letter ‘y’ was often substituted for the diphthong ‘th’ when using type. This is why we see “Ye olde Tea Shoppe”.
‘th’ isn’t a diphthong. I think it’s more properly called a digraph.
If we had to single out one culture to thank, I’d go with the Phoenicians, who pretty much originated the idea of “one letter equals approximately one phoneme,” through the basis for our own alphabet (most of the letters).
They applied this idea not to an Indo-European one like ours (and Latin and Greek), but to a Semitic one (like Hebrew or Arabic). So, they built up their alphabet as if we doing, say, “A is for Apple,” and the character for an “a” sound looked like a stylized apple — except for them it was “A is for ox” (aleph), “B is for house” (beth), etc.
Nitpick: “Kalends/calends” isn’t a Greek loan word, it’s as originally Latin as a word can be. The etymology goes back to calare, meaning “to call out” (because the start of each month was publicly announced). Arachic Latin had the K letter, though it fell out of use in classical times and survived only in very few words. The only ones besides kalends/calends I can think of are Kaeso (a male given name) and Karthago (the name of the Punic city, which certainly is a loan word).
Because it did exist in the original Latin alphabet. It fell out of use in classical times, but Romans remained aware that there was this additional letter that showed up in only very, very few archaic spellings of words.
I had an actual pamphlet on Old Latin around somewhere, but in any case Wikipedia has it as A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X
that is, K is there; no Y; Z in the original place
A nice video summarising the evolution of the alphabets is this:
A common misconception (that sometimes even shows up in classical times): Kronos (spelled with a kappa) and Chronos (spelled with a chi) are two different entities.