K

K is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents /k/. Historically it is from Phoenician kaph ('palm') by way of Greek kappa; rare in native Latin words. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter K the digit 2; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

K's history in Latin is essentially one of near-disappearance and partial return. The letter descends, like C and G, from a Phoenician sign, in this case kaph, transmitted through Greek kappa, and the earliest Etruscan and Roman alphabets included it in its own right. Once C had absorbed the /k/ sound for ordinary Latin use, as covered elsewhere in this atlas, K became almost entirely redundant, and classical Latin kept it only in a handful of fossilised abbreviations, most famously Kalendae, the first day of the Roman month, from which the modern word calendar descends, and a few personal names such as Kaeso. Ordinary Latin vocabulary used C instead throughout the classical period, and K's near-total disuse continued through much of the Middle Ages in the Romance languages descended from Latin, which mostly avoid the letter to this day outside loanwords.

English and the Germanic languages, by contrast, kept K in regular use for the hard /k/ sound before front vowels, a role C could not reliably fill once its own pronunciation began shifting toward /s/ before e and i in French and, through Norman influence, in English. K's angular shape has remained essentially unchanged since its Phoenician origin, since it dropped out of Latin's cursive tradition too early to undergo the shape splits seen in letters such as C, I or U.