Diamond, you're right - in HoME it's spelled Kirith Ungol pretty much the entire time; whenever it was exactly that he decided to change it to Cirith, it must have been very, very late in the process, possibly even just before the book was ready to be printed. I don't know why he changed it to a C, but my hypothesis would be that it was because he based so much of the ME languages (the non-Elvish ones; Rohirric and so forth) upon Anglo-Saxon and its variants. According to Sweet's Primer, Anglo-Saxon had no K, instead, the letter C was always treated as hard. Using K may just have felt "anachronistic" to him. Though of course that wouldn't explain the spelling of the name Kalimac, would it [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. (Calimac just isn't the same, somehow...)
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Father, dear Father, if you see fit, We'll send my love to college for one year yet
Tie blue ribbons all about his head, To let the ladies know that he's married.
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