# 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:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**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 5, 2011, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/41 "2011-06-05T16:39:37Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > 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. …for example, their word for knife: Welsh _cyllell_, Breton _kontell_ is a borrowing from the Romans’ _cultellus_. There were certainly knives before the Romans. The Brythons in Britanny also borrowed the Germanic word from the French: _canif_ is _kanived_. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/42 "2011-06-05T17:20:20Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > 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. Finno-Ugric is the largest branch of the Uralic family. Finnic languages in European Russia also include Ingrian, Karelian, Komi, Mari, and Mordvin, off the top of my head. Saami is Finnic too. Without looking anything up: Azerbaijani, Bashqort, Chuvash, Gagauz, Kalmyk, Kazakh, Tatar, and Turkish are Altaic. How easily we forget that part of Kazakhstan is in Europe! So we have to count Kazakh as a European language too, strange as that seems. Abkhaz and Adyghe are Northwest Caucasian. Chechen, Ingush, and a whole bunch of languages over in Daghestan are Northeast Caucasian. A completely different language family from NWC. Georgian, Laz, Mingrelian, and Svan are Kartvelian languages, also known as South Caucasian. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/43 "2011-06-05T18:12:59Z")
Spectre of Pithecanthropus writes: \> 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. French has a lot of borrowings from Germanic and Celtic sources. The area in Europe where French is now spoken was occupied two thousand (or so) years ago by Celtic and Germanic speakers who eventually started speaking a Romance language. French has more words borrowed from Celtic sources than English. In fact, if you look through moderately common words in English which derived ultimately from Celtic sources, more of them came via French than directly from Irish, Welsh, etc. Derleth writes: \> 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.) The proper term here is “Germanic” and it should be referred to as a subfamily. Morgyn writes: \> More seriously, has Basque been shown to be unrelated to every other \> language known? Does it not even have words borrowed from other languages? Yes, Basque has borrowed a lot of words from other languages. It still clearly is not related to those languages. There’s still a core vocabulary (and grammar and morphology and phonetics) that’s not related to any other language. Peter Morris writes: \> A large proportion of modern English words have their root in 11th century \> French. In fact, it can be clearly seen that the words were borrowed from Norman French, which was the dialect spoken in northern France where the French conquerors of 1066 came from. It’s possible to distinguish the words borrowed from Norman French in the time just after the Norman Conquest and the words borrowed from Parisian French more recently. There are some distinct differences between them. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/44 "2011-06-05T19:41:37Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > 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. Why the snark? There are plenty of words for which we CAN trace the etymology all the way back to PIE. “Knife” may be an exception to that rule, we simply don’t know where it came from before Old Norse. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2011, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/45 "2011-06-05T20:18:17Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > Why the snark? There are plenty of words for which we CAN trace the etymology all the way back to PIE. “Knife” may be an exception to that rule, we simply don’t know where it came from before Old Norse. It’s a joke, not snark. (Specifically, it’s a pun on ‘corpus linguistics’.) **Morgyn** : Of course Basque has borrowed from other languages. All living languages do that. It doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out where the core of the language came from. There are a few hypotheses about how it could be related to other languages, such as Chechen, but they’re so hypothetical other hypotheses point and laugh at them on the bus. ---
**Author:** ![hoobyjuice](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b782af/32.png) [@hoobyjuice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hoobyjuice)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2011, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/46 "2011-06-06T00:07:05Z")
> [@Panurge](#): > > 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). okay wait, why have the “indo” if it didn’t stretch over to the Indus/India region? ---
**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 6, 2011, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/47 "2011-06-06T00:30:59Z")
Because it’s the “Proto” of the Indo-Iranian languages, which do cover both India and Iran. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2011, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/48 "2011-06-06T01:44:26Z")
PIE is called PIE because it is the ancestor of the Indo-European family, which is so called because includes languages from most of Europe and much of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent. It is literally the first of the Indo-European languages. The proto-Indo-European language. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2011, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/49 "2011-06-06T02:09:44Z")
hoobyjuice, as has been suggested above, try reading the Wikipedia entry on Indo-European. The hundreds of present-day languages that are descended from Proto-Indo-European were by the year 1000 A.D. spread out all over Europe, as well as parts of Asia like Iran, Pakistan, and India. Today, of course, they are also spread out over North and South America and Australia. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2011, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/50 "2011-06-06T05:03:18Z")
What is the meaning/source then of the (Gaelic?)/English word “kinch,” then? I have read commentators on _Ulysses_ suggest “short knife” from context, but give up at the end. It is an important question (to some people 🙂 ), because a main character is called by that as his name a number of times. Thanks. Leo ---
**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 6, 2011, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/51 "2011-06-06T06:36:07Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > What is the meaning/source then of the (Gaelic?)/English word “kinch,” then? I have read commentators on _Ulysses_ suggest “short knife” from context, but give up at the end. > It is an important question (to some people 🙂 ), because a main character is called by that as his name a number of times. > > Thanks. > Leo I don’t know why they’d think it means knife. The Oxford Concise Ulster Dictionary lists “_kinch_, a loop, a noose, a twist in rope; an opportunity; an unfair advantage.” They relate it to English _kink_, which is from Dutch. I can’t think of anything in Irish which is remotely close in meaning. The closest in sound is _cinnte_, “certain,” but it’s not close enough to be rendered “kinch.” ---
**Author:** ![gatorslap](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gatorslap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gatorslap)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2011, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/52 "2011-06-06T07:23:20Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > I don’t know why they’d think it means knife. The Oxford Concise Ulster Dictionary lists “_kinch_, a loop, a noose, a twist in rope; an opportunity; an unfair advantage.” They relate it to English _kink_, which is from Dutch. I can’t think of anything in Irish which is remotely close in meaning. The closest in sound is _cinnte_, “certain,” but it’s not close enough to be rendered “kinch.” Is the Oxford Concise Ulster Dictionary a dictionary of Ulster Irish or Ulster Scots? Or just a regional English dictionary? My Scots dictionary defines “kinch” as “a throw of the dice, and the resultant score” and (perhaps figuratively) “one’s lot or fortune”. ---
**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 6, 2011, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150/53 "2011-06-06T16:06:14Z")
> [@gatorslap](#): > > Is the Oxford Concise Ulster Dictionary a dictionary of Ulster Irish or Ulster Scots? Or just a regional English dictionary? > > My Scots dictionary defines “kinch” as “a throw of the dice, and the resultant score” and (perhaps figuratively) “one’s lot or fortune”. Not Irish, the dialect(s) of English spoken in Ulster. Obviously the dialects of English spoken in the Republic would be more useful for “kinch” in Joyce, but I don’t have anything for that lying around. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-knife-start-with-a-k/584150.md?page=2)