C is the third letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History '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". In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants
had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek 'Γ' was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to
represent . 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 and . Of these, 'q' was used to represent or before a rounded vowel, 'k' before
'a', and 'c' elsewhere. During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for
, and 'c' itself was retained for . The use of 'c' 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 'KAΔMOΣ', 'KYPOΣ', and 'ΦΩKIΣ' came into Latin as 'cadmvs', 'cyrvs' and 'phocis',
respectively. Other alphabets have letters homoglyphic to
'c' but not in use and derivation, like the Cyrillic letter Es which derives from the
lunate sigma, named due to its resemblance to the crescent moon.
Later use When the Roman alphabet was introduced into
Britain, 'c' represented only and this value of the letter has been retained in loanwords
to all the insular Celtic languages: in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, 'c' represents only . The Old
English or "Anglo-Saxon" writing was learned from the Celts, apparently of Ireland; hence
'c' in Old English also originally represented ; 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. But during the course of the Old English period, before front vowels
were 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 had also
been going on. In Vulgar Latin, 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 front vowels 〈e〉,〈 i〉. The letter thus represented
two distinct values. Subsequently, the Latin phoneme de-labialized to meaning that the
various Romance languages had before front vowels. In addition, Norman used the Greek
letter 'k' so that the sound could be represented by either 'k' or 'c' the latter of which could
represent either or depending on whether it preceded a front vowel 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, cú, remained unchanged, Cent, cæ´ᵹ, cyng, brece, séoce, were
now spelled 'Kent', 'keȝ', 'kyng', 'breke', and 'seoke'; even cniht was subsequently changed
to 'kniht' and þic changed to 'thik' or 'thikk'. The Old English 'cw' was also at length displaced
by the French 'qu' so that the Old English cwén and cwic became Middle English 'quen'
'quik', respectively. [tʃ] to which Old English palatalized had advanced, also occurred in
French, chiefly from Latin before 'a'. In French it was represented by 'ch', as in champ
and this spelling was introduced into English: the Hatton Gospels, written about 1160, have
in Matt. i-iii, child, chyld, riche, mychel, for the cild, rice, mycel, of the Old English
version whence they were copied. In these cases, the Old English 'c' gave place to 'k
qu ch' but, on the other hand, 'c' in its new value of came in largely in French words
like processiun, emperice, 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 de-affricated to ; and from that
time 'c' has represented before front vowels either for etymological reasons, as in lance,
cent, or to avoid the ambiguity due to the "etymological" use of 's' for , as in ace,
mice, once, pence, defence. Thus, to show the etymology, English spelling
has advise, devise, instead of advize, devize, which 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 necessity for 'c'. Former generations also wrote sence
for sense. Hence, today the Romance languages and English have a common feature inherited
from Vulgar Latin where 'c' takes on either a "hard" or "soft" value depending on the
following vowel. Use in orthographies
English In English orthography, 'c' generally represents
a "soft" value of before the vowel letters 'e', 'i' and 'y' and a "hard" value of before
the vowel letters 'a', 'o' and 'u'. However, there are a number of exceptions in English:
"soccer" and "Celt" are words that have where would be expected.
The soft c may represent the sound in the digraph 'ci' when this precedes a vowel, as
in the words 'delicious' and 'appreciate'. The digraph 'ch' most commonly represents
, but can take the value or ; some dialects of English also have in words like loch where
other speakers pronounce the final sound as . The trigraph 'tch' always represents .
The digraph 'ck' is often used to represent the sound after short vowels.
Other languages In the Romance languages French, Spanish,
Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, 'c' generally has a "hard" value of and a "soft" value,
the pronunciation of which varies by language. In French, Portuguese, and Spanish from Latin
America and southern Spain, the soft 'c' value is as it is in English. In the Spanish spoken
in northern and central Spain, the soft 'c' is a voiceless dental fricative . In Italian
and Romanian, the soft 'c' is [t͡ʃ]. All Balto-Slavic languages that use the Latin
alphabet, as well as Albanian, Hungarian, Pashto, several Sami languages, Esperanto,
Ido, Interlingua, and Americanist phonetic notation use 'c' to represent , the voiceless
alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant affricate. In romanized Chinese, the letter represents
an aspirated version of this sound, . Among non-European languages that have adopted
the Latin alphabet, 'c' represents a variety of sounds. Yup'ik, Indonesian, Malay, and
a number of African languages such as Hausa, Fula, and Manding share the soft Italian value
of . In Azeri, Kurdish, Tatar, and Turkish 'c' stands for the voiced counterpart of this
sound, the voiced postalveolar affricate . In Yabem and similar languages, such as Bukawa,
'c' stands for a glottal stop . Xhosa and Zulu use this letter to represent the click
. in some other African languages, such as Beninese Yoruba, 'c' is used for . In Fijian,
'c' stands for a voiced dental fricative , while in Somali it has the value of .
The letter 'c' is also used as a transliteration of the Cyrillic 'ц' in the Latinic forms
of Serbian, Macedonian, and sometimes Ukrainian. Ch
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, such as: in Spanish
in French and Portuguese in Interlingua and Italian
in the West Slavic languages or sometimes in German
or in Dutch in Romanized Standard Chinese
Other digraphs and trigraphs As in English, 'Ck', with the value , is often
used after short vowels in other Germanic languages such as German and Swedish. The
digraph 'cz' is found in Polish and 'cs' in Hungarian, both representing . The digraph
'sc' represents in Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian,. The trigraph
'sch' represents in German. Other usage
As a phonetic symbol, lowercase 'c' is the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA
symbol for the voiceless palatal plosive, and capital 'C' is the X-SAMPA symbol for
the voiceless palatal fricative. It is used to represent one hundred in Roman
numerals. Related letters and other similar characters
Computing codes 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including
the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
See also Hard and soft C
References
External links Media related to C at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of C at Wiktionary The dictionary definition of c at Wiktionary