I know old English used c to represent the same sound as continental Germanic represents with k. But today we have a mix, cat, crain, catch etc but yet keep kid kill kind king etc. The short answer is "historical reasons". Very very broadly speaking, we inherited the k-words from German or Greek, the c-words from French or Latin. Not to mention many borrowings from far afield like kangaroo and kayak. Is the change in native words such as king, old English cyng due to Scandinavian influence?
The spelling"king" was not fully adopted until about The K sound is spelled in five different ways in English words: 1. And that, folks, is how we ended up with Sir Paul McCartney. Thanks for this explanation! Now I have the answer! Words that start with the kn digraph fall into two camps.
The rest of the words that start with a kn have to do historically with something that is sticking out or something that is stick-shaped.
Knee, knuckle, knoll, knob, knot — all of these are protuberances. Knitting involves making little knots. Knickers are work at the knees. A knife is stick shaped. Seems that if we can drop the pronunciation of the K in Knife, knot, knit, etc. These are only two of several well-known words in English that begin with the letters kn, where the k is silent. Let's see if our friends from The Sentinel can give us any help.
The English language mostly derives from the language of the Angles, who invaded Britain after the Romans left, so it's basically a Germanic language, albeit with French Romance additions courtesy of the Norman Conquest some four hundred years later, in Originally the k was pronounced - it's a voiceless plosive, made by blocking the flow of air with the back of the tongue and then releasing it.
The n sound is make by putting the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth. The combination means the tongue is pretty busy if you say k-nife or k-night, and it's easier to drop the k sound.
In English, the k sound before an n was dropped in the s although the k-n sound survives in languages like German or Dutch. Sorry, Ailian. I didn't refresh. You're theory makes a lot of sense. One only needs to look at the popularity of Estuary English to see how pronunciation patterns change for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say that Estuary English is a change of English for no reason. From what I've read, it has to do with gaining "street credibility," and the dialect owes much of its influence to the London Jamaican dialect.
It also has something to do with less status consciousness and the accepting of some of the traditional patterns of speech that have always existed in East London by the middle class, but not all of those patterns. We could get rid of ''kn'' and ''gn'' and replace them simply with ''n'' but then how would we spell ''know''? If we dropped the ''k'' in ''know'' we'd get ''now'' which is already a word which is pronounced differently.
The reason that they have disappeared from spelling is most likely due to the fact that the sounds were gone by the time that spelling of those words previously having those sounds was standardized in Modern English.
Personally, I like the current spellings as they let us know which is "know" and which is "now" and "knot" or "not" and so on. I've heard somewhere on the web that some Scots pronounce the ''kn'' in words like ''knight'', ''knock'', ''know'', ''knob'', ''knife'' etc. So, if we got rid of ''gn'' and ''kn'' and replaced them with ''n'' it would work for everyone except for those people that use the dental nasals.
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