Hi.

 

Who decided the words

 

know

knuckle

knock

knit

knob

knight

...

 

must be written starting with a K ?

 

(sorry, but no, English is not my first nor second language)

Edited August 23, 201114 yr by Externet

http://www.antimoon.com/forum/2004/5133.htm

Edited August 24, 201114 yr by Realitycheck

Thanks.

The link gets to some origins, then skids off-topic, gets ugly, but could not find a word of who decided that.

No single person decides anything in a language. People either use words or they don't. If they use the words sometimes archaic spelling stay around even though the word has morphed to sound different. Sometimes spelling changes and the word stays the same. There is no one person to blame.

Who decided the words?

As with almost any language, the users of the language decide. Look at the histories of some "kn-" words, where the first entry on that page describes its general evolution.

 

A few of these words are related to one another. For example, it's no mystery that knitting involves some sort of knotting.

 

The "k" was pronounced in previous centuries.

 

A few related words came to modern usage still pronouncing the "k" or its equivalent "g". When Catholics perform "genuflection", the linguistic expert can see that the act is a "knee flex" (genu = knee, flection = flex). Likewise, the linguistic expert can clearly see that an "agnostic" is someone who does not know (a- = not, gnostic = know), or that a "polygon" is a geometric figure with many angles (poly- = many, gon = knee/angle).

The only reason why I posted a link to a meager discussion was because it happened to raise many pertinent issues of the subject, but to summate things, it comes from Old English, where all kinds of seemingly sesnseless vestigial artifacts from the past have a way of clinging on despite inventions like the metric system.

re: ewmon's post, nice link. I had a feeling that it had a Germanic link, but had not dug that deep.

Edited August 24, 201114 yr by Realitycheck

OK.

So there was no group, persons, nobles, scribans, council, government institution, scholars meetings dictating the rules for the English language ?

There was no official board like the Academie francaise - but the dictionary makers and even more so the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (tudor to commonwealth) did much to cement spellings and usage.

So there was no group, persons, nobles, scribans, council, government institution, scholars meetings dictating the rules for the English language ?

The speakers of the English language as a whole seemed to have dominated the pronunciation/spelling of words until Samuel Johnson's dictionary in 1755, and so, until then, spelling was inconsistent to some degree, and tended to be influenced by local pronunciations and spelling customs.

 

Johnson's dictionary drove Noah Webster to want to produce an American dictionary, which he believed would help unify the various far-flung parts of his newly-formed country, making it stronger and more successful. He spent 27 years producing it, which culminated in its publication in 1828. In the process, he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He also simplified complex spelling rules, which is how some American words have slightly different spelling than their British counterparts.