French word doesn’t automatically mean Latin origin, btw.
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See above 
The English word comes from the German word (after chopping off the most important bit) comes from the French word.
In fact, the French word is derived from another French word, “carabin”, which has this etymology according to wiktionary:
1583 in the sense “light cavalrist”. Later (1803) also “medical student”. Etymology uncertain, suggestions include scarrabin “corpse-bearer during the plague” (1521), probably an ironic metaphor from a meaning “plague beetle” (from the family of escarbot , from Latin scarabaeus ). This suggestion implies that the soldiers called carabins were named after their reputation of rapidly and reliably dispatching of their enemies. Alternatively, the meaning “medical student” may be primary, the ironic meaning being attached to “surgeons” (carabin de St Côme , recorded 1650, Saint Cosmas being their patron), with the transfer to “light cavalrist” taking place with a certain military unit enroled under the banner of the same saint.
I know, this one isn’t certain, indeed.
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I have found wiktionary oftentimes reaching (if anyone has seen My Big Fat Greek Weeding, think “kimono”).
In any case, I’ve heard of carabine (with the stress in the last syllable) as a strong wind for ships with sails. And sailing isn’t recent.
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We use a derivative as an adjective, for example a slap karabinato, is a slap that made someone see stars and fairies, and the most usual one is a “penalty karabinato” an obvious penalty in football.
Anyone else?
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My point is that the word did not just directly come from French to English, but rather was borrowed and shortened from a German word, which spells it with K, and this spelling with a K has even stuck around in English, although the spelling with a C has also arisen and seems to have become more common. Maybe the French influence has something to do with that, but I don’t know.
The entire context of this discussion is about “commentor” vs “commenter”, a distinction of only one letter. Hence, my remark pointing out the distinction between “K” vs “C” in Kommentator vs Commentator is just to poke fun that we also need to debate about that single letter, which now, satisfyingly, we have…
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Sounds like a typical day on the forum to me 
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What will come first
- The day we don’t devolve into linguistics in the forums
- The end of the world
0 voters
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No, it’s not… It’s sometimes soft, sometimes hard, but usually appears in loanwords from other languages.
Otherwise, it appears in the German “ch” and “sch” sounds, as well as in “ck”, which is not really a distinct sound, but has the effect to shorten the vowel that comes before it. For example, if “Kuckucksuhr” was written “Kukucksuhr”, the first “u” would be a long “oo” sound, while with the ck behind it, it’s clear that it’s a short vowel.
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My guess is that some guy at some point thought that Kukkukk would look to silly and invented the ck for these instances. The orthography from before 1996 uses kk in syllable breaks at the end of a line: stek-ken.
Because everything, that a traditional c does, can be covered by z or k in German (Zirkus), we can use it for ch and sch.
Speaking of which, I do wonder why the first monks to write German words decided to use k for the [k]. They first learnt to write Latin which never uses K except a small handful of words. Maybe they perceived the Old German K sound as something very distinct from the Latin hard C, I don’t know.
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I don’t know what is bopomofo. Accents are harder to keep right when you write it’ easy to miss between a 1 and a 3 or a 1 and a 2 or… You need to keep a very focused writing.
Historical differences too. Salt was an important way to keep food edible.
Now in my love of food I would never let a standard company of milk products decide how much salt is my standard. I own a fridge.
We have lots of salted foods historically.
Well sure but for me the relevant salted products in my kitchen are beyond a mere mix of salt and butter.
In Bopomoto, it uses ˊ ˇ ˋ to distinguish different tones, and it’s very easy to miss them.
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Yes these accents are really nice to imagine but a nightmare to use (I think mainly of hand writing)
It’s rarely used in formal writing though. Only see them in dictionaries or kids’ books.
And have to put the tone marker in different places when the text is line up left to right horizontally, or up and down vertically. And there is no “first tone” marker either.
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If Go were a movie, it would be:
- Comedy
- Horror
- Thriller
- Action
- Rom-com
- Sci-fi
- Fantasy
0 voters
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x Drama
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