---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment At 8:09 PM -0500 8/11/02, Erwinspiano@aol.com wrote: > Stray thought. Why does the word knife have a K on the front of >it any way. > Dale Erwin Hi Dale, Because the word comes from the Old English 'cnif' (earliest known usage was during the 11th century). As with modern Italian, in Old English every letter was pronounced. English language speakers have become lazier, dropping the initial letter of certain letter combinations that are difficult to sound together when speaking but retaining them in the written word. At the same time as the word appeared in Old English, it also occurred in Middle Low German (knif), Old Norse (knif), Dutch (knijf) and Danish (kniv). As these languages all stem from the same Indo-European family of languages, our modern word 'knife' could have come from any of them. (just to absolve myself from being credited with any real knowledge in this area, this contribution to the list comes compliments of my wife Kristie, who's area of specialty is linguistics and myths and legends) Ron O. -- _______________________ OVERS PIANOS - SYDNEY Grand Piano Manufacturers Web: http://overspianos.com.au mailto:info@overspianos.com.au _______________________ ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/c9/d6/21/9a/attachment.htm ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment--
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