Expert: Maria - 2/11/2007

Question
Two questions, first I know that the leter K occurs only rarely in Latin, chiefly in Kalendae and derivatives, any other examples? Second, how is church, or ecclesiastical Latin different from the Latin of say, Lucretius or Pliny?

Answer
Hello,

Here are my answers.

1-You are right: the K, which was the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet, occurs only rarely in Latin, chiefly in ‘Kalendae’.
Other examples are a few proper names and place names like “Kaeso”, a masculine proper name, and “ Karthago”, a place name, as well as few nouns which derive from Greek like “klepsydra” and “Koppa”, an obsolete  letter of the Greek alphabet used later only as a number, i.e. the number 90.
All these words containing kappa are however often written in Latin with "c", i.e. Caeso, Carthago, clepsydra or clepsidra.
To conclude, the letter K in classical times had been generally replaced by C,  except in a very small number of words.


2- Ecclesiastical Latin ( also called Church Latin as used in documents of the Roman Catholic Church and in its liturgies) is different from classical Latin  of Lucretius, Livy, Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, Pliny, Tacitus, etc. not so much for its syntax which does not differ radically from classical authors, but  for its use of Latinized terms of modern life like “instrumentum computatorium” (computer), “birota” (bicycle), etc. and for its lack of elegance.

Best regards,
Maria