# Why doesn't Latin, and its Romance daughters, use the letter 'k' much?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-latin-and-its-romance-daughters-use-the-letter-k-much/169177>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 16, 2003, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-latin-and-its-romance-daughters-use-the-letter-k-much/169177 "2003-04-16T21:44:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![syncrolecyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f08c70/32.png) [@syncrolecyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/syncrolecyne)\
**Post date:** [April 16, 2003, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-latin-and-its-romance-daughters-use-the-letter-k-much/169177/1 "2003-04-16T21:44:01Z")

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While ‘K’ is part of the Roman Alphabet - and taken straight from the Greek I assume, why is it basically unused in Latin? Now I know at one point the ‘C’ was always hard, but at some point it softened before e, i, or y and to permit a ‘k’ sound before those vowels, the qu or (in Italian)ch was used. but why didn’t the late Romans/early Romance writers use a ‘k’.

Even now when ‘k’ is used in French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese; it is mainly for words of foreign origin (kiosk, kilometre/o)…and even there thwere is a tendancy to ‘Latinise’ the word by ridding the k. (quiosco, quilometro).

Why this aversion to the ‘k’?

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**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\
**Post date:** [April 16, 2003, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-latin-and-its-romance-daughters-use-the-letter-k-much/169177/2 "2003-04-16T22:14:49Z")

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Very observant. The Greek Kappa came from the Semitic Kap. The Semitic sound value for the letter K was maintained in Classic and Modern languages, but Latin itself abandoned K almost entirely for C. Because the C was hard in classic Latin, the letter K was used for primarily for words borrowed from the Greek. I suppose as time progressed and the connection to the Greek language became more tenuous this happened less and less often, and C became the dominant letter for the /k/ sound. So the Romance languages only use K for foreign words.