# Why does knife start with a 'k'? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 3, 2011, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150 "2011-06-03T00:26:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2011, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/21 "2011-06-03T16:09:46Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Right. We’re so used to the idea of English words that have French origins that we forget that it sometimes worked the other way too. Sometimes French acquired words from English. However, it also acquired words from other Germanic languages because it was invaded by Germanic peoples, including the Franks who managed to give their name to the country. For example, the words for the four directions (nord, sud, est, ouest) all come from Germanic words: the Latin words for those are quite different. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2011, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/22 "2011-06-03T16:51:41Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > For example, the words for the four directions (nord, sud, est, ouest) all come from Germanic words: the Latin words for those are quite different. Right. The Latin words were the ones used to make the adjectives related to the directions however: méridional, septentrional, occidental, oriental (southern, northern, western, eastern respectively) ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/23 "2011-06-04T01:11:12Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Right. The Latin words were the ones used to make the adjectives related to the directions however: méridional, septentrional, occidental, oriental (southern, northern, western, eastern respectively) [sidebar] which I’ve always found quite beautiful for their clear reference to their origins: _oriens_ from _oriri_ (to rise), _meridies_ (noon), _occidens_ from _occidere_ (to set), _septentrio_ from the seven stars of the Little Dipper. ---
**Author:** ![hoobyjuice](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b782af/32.png) [@hoobyjuice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hoobyjuice)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/24 "2011-06-04T07:19:41Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > If you ask… you eventually get back to Proto-Indo-European Oooh thats interesting, thanks for introducing me to Proto-Indo-European. Now tell me the etymology of “proto-” and “indo-” 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/25 "2011-06-04T07:54:51Z")
> [@hoobyjuice](#): > > Oooh thats interesting, thanks for introducing me to Proto-Indo-European. > > Now tell me the etymology of “proto-” and “indo-” 😃 “Proto-” comes from the Greek “πρῶτος” (prōtos), meaning first or earliest. “Indo-” comes from the same source as “India”, “Indies”, “Hindi” and “Hindu” – the Sanskrit name of the river Indus, “Sindh”, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word for river. (In case you were being serious). ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/26 "2011-06-04T16:26:56Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > If you ask ‘where does that come from’ enough when dealing with either French or German\*, you eventually get back to Proto-Indo-European, which is the hypothetical reconstructed language for most (but not all) languages spoken in Europe, and a good number of them spoken in a swath that runs east of Europe all the way down into India. > > \*(German, here, is a broad family including what you’d think of as German and Dutch, plus all languages derived from Old Norse (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and some others) and some extinct languages such as Gothic. English is German by this meaning.) > > ‘Reconstructed’ means we have no written records of it; everything we think we know about it comes from comparative linguistics, which means we’ve compared a lot of languages to work out a hypothetical family tree for them and worked backwards to this one single language which is the ancestor of a great many of them. (Incidentally, this is why Proto-Indo-European words are spelled with an asterisk (\*) in front of them: It serves no phonetic role, it merely marks the word as a reconstruction.) Both French and German share a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European; going back farther than that takes you into territory where there is much less agreement among scholars. > > (One European language not derived from Proto-Indo-European is Basque; we have no idea where Basque came from, or how it’s related to anything else. It’s a linguistic isolate.) Two points: First, while your overall post is true in general, in the case of “knife” the etymology doesn’t seem to be traceable past Old Norse. Second, three other European languages that are not Indo-European are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. They are part of another language family, I think Finno-Ugric. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/27 "2011-06-04T17:14:15Z")
(Hamsters keep eating this post, so sorry if it posts thrice.) And Saami (Lappish). And Turkish. And, if you stretch “Europe” to include “European Russian and the European former Soviet Republics” you get to add Georgian, Chuvash, and a whole bunch of others. ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/28 "2011-06-04T17:48:49Z")
n/m ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/29 "2011-06-04T19:08:28Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > Two points: > > First, while your overall post is true in general, in the case of “knife” the etymology doesn’t seem to be traceable past Old Norse. Well, if we could just resurrect the right people we’d be able to trace it back all the way to PIE. Sadly, the field of corpse linguistics is quite empty. > [@](#): > > Second, three other European languages that are not Indo-European are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. They are part of another language family, I think Finno-Ugric. Indeed the case. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/30 "2011-06-05T04:42:43Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > The French word for pocket knife is _canif_. (Not that this changes the story of its origin) According to the OED this was a Germanic-to-Old French borrowing. There are a number of such words that were borrowed one way or the other, during the early contacts between various Germanic peoples on one side, and the early Romance speaking people in France and elsewhere. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/31 "2011-06-05T04:43:49Z")
> [@hoobyjuice](#): > > Oooh thats interesting, thanks for introducing me to Proto-Indo-European. Longtime members are going to kill me: When come back bring PIE. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/32 "2011-06-05T04:50:25Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > “Proto-” comes from the Greek “πρῶτος” (prōtos), meaning first or earliest. > > “Indo-” comes from the same source as “India”, “Indies”, “Hindi” and “Hindu” – the Sanskrit name of the river Indus, “Sindh”, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word for river. > > (In case you were being serious). To elaborate, historical linguists traditionally have named the broad language “phyla” according to the extremities of the regions they cover, so, Indo-European, Finno-Ugric (Ugric referring to the Uighur people of Central Asia, and Uto-Aztecan to name a few examples. This is why some of the language group names sound so odd. ---
**Author:** ![Morgyn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morgyn/32/3041_2.png) [@Morgyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgyn)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/33 "2011-06-05T07:00:02Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > \ > (One European language not derived from Proto-Indo-European is Basque; we have no idea where Basque came from, or how it’s related to anything else. It’s a linguistic isolate.) Refugees from Atlantis, of course. 😉 More seriously, has Basque been shown to be unrelated to every other language known? Does it not even have words borrowed from other languages? ---
**Author:** ![hoobyjuice](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b782af/32.png) [@hoobyjuice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hoobyjuice)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 7:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/34 "2011-06-05T07:15:15Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > “Indo-” comes from the same source as “India”, “Indies”, “Hindi” and “Hindu” – the Sanskrit name of the river Indus, “Sindh”, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word for river. > > (In case you were being serious). Yes I was being serious 😃 So PIE was spoken by people all the way from Europe over to what we now call India? ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/35 "2011-06-05T07:52:58Z")
No, not really. PIE was (perhaps) spoken in an area somewhere between Anatolia and area north of the Caspian Sea. From there it spread in several directions and ended up “fathering” several other proto-languages, like [Proto Indo-Iranian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Iranian_language). Try reading the [main article on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Discovery_and_reconstruction) and [a few of the](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_Urheimat_hypotheses) [related ones](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis). Note that PIE and other proto-languages are _reconstructed_ from later languages. We have a pretty good idea about how they were constructed, but there is no direct evidence. ---
**Author:** ![Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hypnagogic_jerk/32/4252_2.png) [@Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypnagogic_Jerk)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 8:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/36 "2011-06-05T08:21:17Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > To elaborate, historical linguists traditionally have named the broad language “phyla” according to the extremities of the regions they cover, so, Indo-European, Finno-Ugric (Ugric referring to the Uighur people of Central Asia, and Uto-Aztecan to name a few examples. This is why some of the language group names sound so odd. But the Uighurs speak a Turkic language, not a Uralic one. According to Wikipedia Ugric actually comes from [Yugra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugra), which is also in Central Asia although northwest of where the Uighurs live. And I think the names of those vast language families developed naturally, as they were constructed by comparing geographically distant languages. We started talking about Indo-European languages, for example, when linguists discovered that Sanskrit and other Indian languages had similarities with most European languages. The name was an obvious one, and I don’t think there was any special effort to find the “extremities” of the region where Indo-European languages are spoken. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/37 "2011-06-05T12:21:06Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > (Ugric referring to the Uighur people of Central Asia I was under the impression that Ugric was a referenceto Hungarian. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/38 "2011-06-05T13:56:13Z")
> [@hoobyjuice](#): > > So, um, yeah, why does knife start with a ‘k’? > > I don’t buy that explanation that its from the french word ‘canif’. The english isle predecessors surely must have come up with their own word for sharp pointy cutting things before there was such a thing as ‘french’. Why do you find that unlikely? Quick lesson in British history, and etymology. In the year 1066 a load of Frenchmen invaded our country, and stayed for several hundred years as a ruling class. They brought with them a load of forreign words, which entered the language. A large proportion of modern English words have their root in 11th century French. ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/39 "2011-06-05T16:28:52Z")
As others have said, “knife” doesn’t necessarily come from French. It is probably a cognate term among the Germanic language group. It exist in Scandinavian languages today - in Danish it is “kniv” - with the _kn_ pronounced as in loc_kn_ut (sorry. Couldn’t think of a proper English word, so I made one up). According to my etymological dictionary the origin of the word is a common Old Germanic word: \*knīf- (_n._ knife - or a curved blade) \<- \*knīpan (_vb._ bend, press together). The same sound/letter combination is found in “knot”, Danish “knude”, and many others. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/40 "2011-06-05T16:30:58Z")
> [@hoobyjuice](#): > > So, um, yeah, why does knife start with a ‘k’? > > I don’t buy that explanation that its from the french word ‘canif’. The english isle predecessors surely must have come up with their own word for sharp pointy cutting things before there was such a thing as ‘french’. Brythonic Celts and later Anglo-Saxons had all kinds of words for things that were later replaced by words from other languages. This is true of any language really. You can’t guess by the meaning of a word how long it has been in a language. Language is subject to change by fashion. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150.md?page=3)