C, or c, is the third letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is cee (pronounced /ˈsiː/), plural cees.[1]
"C" comes from the same letter as "G". The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)".[2]
In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek 'Γ' (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent /k/. Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a '' form in Early Etruscan, then '' in Classical Etruscan. In Latin, it eventually took the 'c' form in Classical Latin. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters 'c k q' were used to represent the sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, 'q' was used to represent /k/ or /ɡ/ before a rounded vowel, 'k' before 'a', and 'c' elsewhere.[3] During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for /ɡ/, and 'c' itself was retained for /k/. The use of 'c' (and its variant 'g') replaced most usages of 'k' and 'q'. Hence, in the classical period and after, 'g' was treated as the equivalent of Greek gamma, and 'c' as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek words, as in 'ΚΑΔΜΟΣ', 'ΚΥΡΟΣ', and 'ΦΩΚΙΣ' came into Latin as 'cadmvs', 'cyrvs' and 'phocis', respectively.
Other alphabets have letters homoglyphic to 'c' but not analogous in use and derivation, like the Cyrillic letter Es (С, с) which derives from the lunate sigma.
Later use
When the Roman alphabet was introduced into Britain, ⟨c⟩ represented only /k/, and this value of the letter has been retained in loanwords to all the insular Celtic languages: in Welsh,[4]Irish, and Gaelic, ⟨c⟩ represents only /k/. The Old English Latin-based writing system was learned from the Celts, apparently of Ireland; hence, ⟨c⟩ in Old English also originally represented /k/; the Modern English words kin, break, broken, thick, and seek all come from Old English words written with ⟨c⟩: cyn, brecan, brocen, þicc, and séoc. However, during the course of the Old English period, /k/ before front vowels (/e/ and /i/) was palatalized, having changed by the tenth century to [tʃ], though ⟨c⟩ was still used, as in cir(i)ce, wrecc(e)a. On the continent, meanwhile, a similar phonetic change before the same two vowels had also been going on in almost all modern romance languages (for example, in Italian).
In Vulgar Latin, /k/ became palatalized to [tʃ] in Italy and Dalmatia; in France and the Iberian Peninsula, it became [ts]. Yet for these new sounds, ⟨c⟩ was still used before the letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩. The letter thus represented two distinct values. Subsequently, the Latin phoneme /kw/ (spelled ⟨qv⟩) de-labialized to /k/, meaning that the various Romance languages had /k/ before front vowels. In addition, Norman used the letter ⟨k⟩ so that the sound /k/ could be represented by either ⟨k⟩ or ⟨c⟩, the latter of which could represent either /k/ or /ts/ depending on whether it preceded a front vowel letter or not. The convention of using both ⟨c⟩ and ⟨k⟩ was applied to the writing of English after the Norman Conquest, causing a considerable re-spelling of the Old English words. Thus, while Old English candel, clif, corn, crop, and cú, remained unchanged, cent, cǣᵹ (cēᵹ), cyng, brece, and sēoce, were now (without any change of sound) spelled Kent, keȝ, kyng, breke, and seoke; even cniht ('knight') was subsequently changed to kniht, and þic ('thick') was changed to thik or thikk. The Old English ⟨cw⟩ was also at length displaced by the French ⟨qu⟩ so that the Old English cwēn ('queen') and cwic ('quick') became Middle Englishquen and quik, respectively.
The sound [tʃ], to which Old English palatalized /k/ had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly from Latin /k/ before ⟨a⟩. In French, it was represented by the digraph ⟨ch⟩, as in champ (from Latin camp-um), and this spelling was introduced into English: the Hatton Gospels, written c.1160, have in Matt. i-iii, child, chyld, riche, and mychel, for the cild, rice, and mycel of the Old English version whence they were copied. In these cases, the Old English ⟨c⟩ gave way to ⟨k⟩, ⟨qu⟩ and ⟨ch⟩; on the other hand, ⟨c⟩ in its new value of /ts/ appeared largely in French words like processiun, emperice, and grace and was also substituted for ⟨ts⟩ in a few Old English words, as miltse, bletsien, in early Middle English milce, blecien. By the end of the thirteenth century, both in France and England, this sound /ts/ was de-affricated to /s/; and from that time, ⟨c⟩ has represented /s/ before front vowels either for etymological reasons, as in lance, cent, or to avoid the ambiguity due to the "etymological" use of ⟨s⟩ for /z/, as in ace, mice, once, pence, defence.
Thus, to show etymology, English spelling has advise, devise (instead of *advize, *devize), while advice, device, dice, ice, mice, twice, etc., do not reflect etymology; example has extended this to hence, pence, defence, etc., where there is no etymological reason for using ⟨c⟩. Former generations also wrote sence for sense. Hence, today, the Romance languages and English have a common feature inherited from Vulgar Latin spelling conventions where ⟨c⟩ takes on either a "hard" or "soft" value depending on the following letter.
In English orthography, ⟨c⟩ generally represents the "soft" value of /s/ before the letters ⟨e⟩ (including the Latin-derived digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩, or the corresponding ligatures ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩), ⟨i⟩, and ⟨y⟩, and a "hard" value of /k/ before any other letters or at the end of a word. However, there are a number of exceptions in English: "soccer", "celt" and "sceptic" are words that have /k/ where /s/ would be expected. The "soft" ⟨c⟩ may represent the /ʃ/ sound in the digraph ⟨ci⟩ when this precedes a vowel, as in the words 'delicious' and 'appreciate', and also in the word "ocean" and its derivatives.
The digraph ⟨ch⟩ most commonly represents /tʃ/, but can also represent /k/ (mainly in words of Greek origin) or /ʃ/ (mainly in words of French origin). For some dialects of English, it may also represent /x/ in words like loch, while other speakers pronounce the final sound as /k/. The trigraph ⟨tch⟩ always represents /tʃ/. The digraph ⟨ck⟩ is often used to represent the sound /k/ after short vowels, like in "wicket".
In the Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese, ⟨c⟩ generally has a "hard" value of /k/ and a "soft" value whose pronunciation varies by language. In French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish from Latin America and some places in Spain, the soft ⟨c⟩ value is /s/ as it is in English. In the Spanish spoken in most of Spain, the soft ⟨c⟩ is a voiceless dental fricative/θ/. In Italian and Romanian, the soft ⟨c⟩ is [t͡ʃ].
Germanic languages usually use ⟨c⟩ for Romance loans or digraphs, such as ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ck⟩, but the rules vary across languages. Of all the Germanic languages, only English uses the initial ⟨c⟩ in native Germanic words like come. Other than English, Dutch uses ⟨c⟩ the most, for most Romance loans and the digraph ⟨ch⟩. German uses ⟨c⟩ in the digraphs ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ck⟩, and the trigraph ⟨sch⟩, but by itself only in unassimilated loanwords and proper names. Danish keeps soft ⟨c⟩ in Romance words but changes hard ⟨c⟩ to ⟨k⟩. Swedish has the same rules for soft and hard ⟨c⟩ as Danish, and also uses ⟨c⟩ in the digraph ⟨ck⟩ and the very common word och, "and". Norwegian, Afrikaans, and Icelandic are the most restrictive, replacing all cases of ⟨c⟩ with ⟨k⟩ or ⟨s⟩, and reserving ⟨c⟩ for unassimilated loanwords and names.
The letter ⟨c⟩ is also used as a transliteration of Cyrillic ⟨ц⟩ in the Latin forms of Serbian, Macedonian, and sometimes Ukrainian, along with the digraph ⟨ts⟩.
There are several common digraphs with ⟨c⟩, the most common being ⟨ch⟩, which in some languages (such as German) is far more common than ⟨c⟩ alone. ⟨ch⟩ takes various values in other languages.
As in English, ⟨ck⟩, with the value /k/, is often used after short vowels in other Germanic languages such as German and Swedish (other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Norwegian, use ⟨kk⟩ instead). The digraph ⟨cz⟩ is found in Polish and ⟨cs⟩ in Hungarian, representing /t͡ʂ/ and /t͡ʃ/ respectively. The digraph ⟨sc⟩ represents /ʃ/ in Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian (where this only happens before front vowels, while otherwise it represents /sk/). The trigraph ⟨sch⟩ represents /ʃ/ in German.
𝼝: Small letter c with retroflex hook – Para-IPA version of the IPA retroflex tʂ.[6]
ꟲ: Modifier letter capital c – Used to mark tone for the Chatino orthography in Oaxaca, Mexico; used as a generic transcription for a falling tone; also used in para-IPA notation.[7]
The Latin letters ⟨C⟩ and ⟨c⟩ have Unicode encodings U+0043CLATIN CAPITAL LETTER C and U+0063cLATIN SMALL LETTER C. These are the same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859. There are also precomposed character encodings for ⟨C⟩ and ⟨c⟩ with diacritics, for most of those listed above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics.
G, or g, is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is gee, plural gees.
H, or h, is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch, or regionally haitch, plural haitches.
K, or k, is the eleventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is kay, plural kays.
S, or for lowercase, s, is the nineteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and other latin alphabets worldwide. Its name in English is ess, plural esses.
T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee, plural tees.
X, or x, is the twenty-fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ex, plural exes.
Z, or z, is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the Latin alphabet. It is used in the modern English alphabet, in the alphabets of other Western European languages, and in others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed, which is most commonly used in British English and zee, most commonly used in North American English, with an occasional archaic variant izzard.
A caron is a diacritic mark placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Italian orthography uses the Latin alphabet to write the Italian language. This article focuses on the writing of Standard Italian, based historically on the Florentine variety of Tuscan.
The Maltese alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet with the addition of some letters with diacritic marks and digraphs. It is used to write the Maltese language, which evolved from the otherwise extinct Siculo-Arabic dialect, as a result of 800 years of independent development. It contains 30 letters: 24 consonants and 6 vowels.
The first Slovak orthography was proposed by Anton Bernolák (1762–1813) in his Dissertatio philologico-critica de litteris Slavorum, used in the six-volume Slovak-Czech-Latin-German-Hungarian Dictionary (1825–1927) and used primarily by Slovak Catholics.
Esh is a character used in phonology to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative.
The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨t͡ʃ ⟩, ⟨t͜ʃ ⟩ ⟨tʃ ⟩, or, in broad transcription, ⟨c⟩. This affricate has a dedicated symbol U+02A7ʧLATIN SMALL LETTER TESH DIGRAPH, which has been retired by the International Phonetic Association but is still used. The alternative commonly used in American tradition is ⟨č⟩. It is familiar to English speakers as the "ch" sound in "chip".
Ch is a digraph in the Latin script. It is treated as a letter of its own in the Chamorro, Old Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Igbo, Uzbek, Quechua, Ladino, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Ukrainian, Japanese, Latynka, and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. Formerly ch was also considered a separate letter for collation purposes in Modern Spanish, Vietnamese, and sometimes in Polish; now the digraph ch in these languages continues to be used, but it is considered as a sequence of letters and sorted as such.
Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet was Benjamin Franklin's proposal for a spelling reform of the English language. The alphabet was based on the Latin alphabet used in English.
In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft ⟨c⟩ occurs in which ⟨c⟩ represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard ⟨c⟩ often precedes the non-front vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩, and is that of the voiceless velar stop,. The sound of a soft ⟨c⟩, typically before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩, may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft ⟨c⟩ is.
References
↑ "C" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "cee", op. cit.
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