The Most Dangerous Letter

The other day I was asking a friend who's living in Port-au-Prince if she knew anything about how Haiti same to have so many k's. The inspiration was the mountain village of Kenscoff, just south of the capital, that figures in Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. We're still trying to track down the origin of that name, but Kreyol (aka Haitian Creole) has lots of k's, whereas French, the country's other national language, has, more or less none.

A few searches turned up a great long answer, a chapter in the book Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

My take-away from the article (most of which you can, and should, read) that Kreyol orthographies are various and contested, and that the first major promoted one (McConnell-Laubach) seems to have been introduced by American protestant missionaries (hey, we do love translating into local dialects!). The Wikipidia entry on Haitian Creole points out that most Kreyol spellings are very similar to the words' renditions in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Meanwhile, I'll type for you my favorite sentence from the Language Ideologies chapter...

Among the most contested letters is k, which not only represents the danger of U.S. imperialism but has even been claimed to represent the threat of communism.

As for k's in French, they're all from other, non-romance languages. Here's the entire k section from the admittedly pocket-sized 1968 Dennison French Dictionary ("All Important Words"):

kangaurou, kayak, képi, kilogramme, kilometre, kiosque

What's really fun is imagining using all six of those words in a single sentence!

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The whole idea of dangerous letters leads us, of course, to Costa-Garvas's 1969 film Z, a very slight fictionalization ("Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.") of a political murder in 1960s Greece.

The film (quite good and gripping, by the way), explains its title in a bit of screen text tacked at the end of the epilogue, just after we hear of the subsequent terrible things that happened to all the characters:

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"