Comment on Why do languages sometimes have letters which don't have consistent pronunciations?
paequ2@lemmy.today 1 day ago
For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one?
In Spanish, words that use k instead of c tend to come from “other” languages, like Greek, Arabic, Japanese, or Russian.
Aparece en palabras procedentes de otras lenguas en las que se ha buscado respetar la ortografía originaria, o en voces transcritas de lenguas que emplean alfabetos o sistemas de escritura distintos del nuestro, como el griego, el árabe, el japonés o el ruso
vateso5074@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yep. The letter K is basically a concession of the Latin alphabet to make some more sense of Greek loanwords, where the letter K is originally from, following a series of pronunciation shifts. But C is the Latin K, so words of Latin origin (the majority of vocabulary in Romance languages like Spanish) will normally only use C for that sound.
K is more useful in languages where the soft C has entered use (like French, Spanish, English, and others) just because K is always hard and makes it easier to define the pronunciation of loanwords that may otherwise encourage the wrong pronunciation when paired with certain vowels (kite, cite, and site all being different words in English, for example).