Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by thaumasiotes on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @01:55AM
(#14693822)
If you look at the qualifier Quintilian adds (the video translates it as "the letter C keeps its strength before all the vowels"), you can see why K was in use at the time -- the sound change familiar from modern Romance languages, where C "softens" to [s] or [tʃ] before front vowels, made indicating [k] before front vowels difficult.
That is an innovation to deal with language change. It is not a part of classical or old Latin. Quintilian isn't proposing dropping K because C makes it unnecessary; he's proposing retroactively not adopting K in the first place because the change that prompted people to use it is wrong.
And I seem to have swapped 'c' and 'k'; Quintilian wished to eliminate 'k' in favor of 'c', which is probably why you think there is no Latin letter 'k'.