Random thought: Kris and variants

[pne]

I think that the spellings "Kristina" / "Kristopher" / "Kris" with initial K- look ugly. As in, icky icky "who would want to call their child that, that's just Wrong" ugly.

Oddly enough, perhaps, I'm fine with "Kristen", "Kristin", and "Kirsten" (and "Kerstin", which I haven't seen on a native English speaker)—possibly because I haven't seen those names spelled with Chr-.

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

The "Ch"-spelling, for all that I know, originated in the transliteration of Greek

*nods* That's what I've heard, too -- Romans borrowed Greek words with chi in them with a "ch" spelling.

and would originally signify the /x/ sound at the end of German "bach"

Depends on what time period you're talking about; as far as I know, chi in Attic Greek represented an aspirated /k/ sound (as "k" at the beginning of English words such as "key", where the "k" is accompanied by a puff of air), which justifies the spelling of "ch" in Latin, since "c" is /k/ and "h" is /h/. (Similarly for the spellings "ph", which was aspirated "p" -- /p_h/ -- as in English "puff" in Ancient Greek, and didn't change to /f/ until later, or "th", which was aspirated /t_h/ originally and later /T/, i.e. the sound th- in English "thick".)