[Spellyans] An abecedary Grêk

[Michael Everson]

On 2 Jan 2016, at 16:38, Eddie Climo <eddie_climo at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Yes, in Unicode they are of course different characters. But, historically, the Roman <k> was derived from the Greek kappa; so, in that sense, they're not different characters.

If you want to go down this route of argument, I’ll point out that Latin ‹k› did not derive from Greek ‹κ› kappa. It derived from Old Italic ‹𐌊› ka. Old Italic ka derived from Greek kappa, and Greek kappa was derived from Phoenican ‹𐤊› kaf. 

Your suggestion (based on derivation) could be taken to mean that Latin k is “not a different character” from Phoenician kaf. But I don’t think that this is correct.

In any case, it seems to me that there’s no compelling reason to prefer kappa in Standard Cornish to cappa. We write “capten" ‘captain’ because of the typical spelling rule. I suppose Common Cornish writes “kapten”. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/