C Through Space and Time
The
letter C is one strange duck. Historically, its precursor first popped up
in the
Phoenician alphabet, where it was used to represent the sound 'G'.
This was then ported over to Greek, becoming the third letter in the
Greek alphabet:
alpha α,
beta β,
gamma γ,
delta δ.
So far, so good... but then the Romans messed up. Initially, they used
gamma for both the 'G' and 'K' sounds, but this was too confusing so
they decided to split it up. Henceforth the letter C would always be
read 'K', and a C with a little hook added to it -- today known as G --
would be read 'G'. Simple enough, although people ignorant of the finer
points of Latin orthography still insist on ordering their Caesar salads
as see-zer salads, instead of the original keh-sar.
O tempora, o mores!
Then came the Dark Ages, and Latin was fragmented into dozens of dialects.
In many, a phenomenon called palatalization took place before soft vowels, shifting the 'K' sound roughly like this:
- 'K'
- 'KY'
- 'CH' (present-day Romanian, Italian)
- 'TS' (German)
- 'S' (French, Portuguese)
- 'TH' (Castilian Spanish)
Different orthographies were then developed to deal with the mess.
The
French came up with the curlicue known as the
cedilla Ç
to flag soft C's in some vowel combinations.
Italian decided to default
to the soft 'CH', so
c'è is pronounced "che", but harden it if
followed by a hard vowel or the letter H, so
che is pronounced "ke".
English, typically, imported its vocabulary left and right without
doing anything about the orthography, and was left with the
unholy mess poked at in
tem42's writeup.
Fortunately, most languages using Latin letters but without the historical
baggage of Romance roots decided that this was ridiculous, and either
standardized the letter to mean one sound only, or dropped it entirely. Unfortunately, standards are wonderful
since there are so many to choose from, so here's a partial list of
possible English readings and the languages they are used in, with a few additional notes on what various squigglies added to the letter do.
- 'CH'
- 'J'
- 'K'
- 'S'
- Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Bulgarian etc)
- This is not the letter C at all, but the Cyrillic
glyph С, which developed from Greek sigma Σ, not gamma. But your average Cold War-era Westerner will still read "СССР" as "see-see-see-pee", so for the record, it's "es-es-es-ar".
- 'SH'
- 'TH'
- 'TS'
...and two sounds completely absent from English:
- dental click
- voiceless pharyngeal fricative
- Somali
- This sound is written ' (open quote) in most flavors of romanized Arabic and Hebrew, and the even stranger Ħ in Maltese. The easiest approximation in English is to just leave it out entirely!
Many orthographies based on English or Spanish, such as
Swahili,
Quechua and
even
Hepburn Japanese, use the letter C only in the combination CH,
which is read as an English 'CH' sound. There are also a large number of languages
where the letter C is used for loanwords only (eg.
Finnish,
Tagalog,
Icelandic), which means that C can (theoretically) use
any of the readings above.
References
www.omniglot.org
Gritchka the cunning linguist