C, or c, is the third letter in the English and ISO basic Latin alphabets.
Its name in English is cee (pronounced ), plural cees."
C" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "cee", op.
cit.
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 (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)".
In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek 'Γ' (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent .
Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a '15px' form in Early Etruscan, then '15px' in Classical Etruscan.
In Latin it eventually took the '' form in Classical Latin.
In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters '' were used to represent the sounds  and  (which were not differentiated in writing).
Of these, '' was used to represent  or  before a rounded vowel, '' before '', and '' elsewhere.
During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for , and '' itself was retained for .
The use of '' (and its variant '') replaced most usages of '' and ''.
Hence, in the classical period and after, '' was treated as the equivalent of Greek gamma, and '' as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek words, as in 'ΚΑΔΜΟΣ', 'ΚΥΡΟΣ', and 'ΦΩΚΙΣ' came into Latin as '', '' and '', 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, named due to its resemblance to the crescent moon.
Later use
When the Roman alphabet was introduced into Britain,  represented only , and this value of the letter has been retained in loanwords to all the insular Celtic languages: in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic,  represents only .
The Old English Latin-based writing system was learned from the Celts, apparently of Ireland; hence  in Old English also originally represented ; the Modern English words kin, break, broken, thick, and seek all come from Old English words written with : , and .
However, during the course of the Old English period,  before front vowels ( and ) were palatalized, having changed by the tenth century to , though  was still used, as in .
On the continent, meanwhile, a similar phonetic change had also been going on (for example, in Italian).
In Vulgar Latin,  became palatalized to  in Italy and Dalmatia; in France and the Iberian peninsula, it became .
Yet for these new sounds  was still used before the letters  and .
The letter thus represented two distinct values.
Subsequently, the Latin phoneme  (spelled ) de-labialized to  meaning that the various Romance languages had  before front vowels.
In addition, Norman used the letter  so that the sound  could be represented by either  or , the latter of which could represent either  or  depending on whether it preceded a front vowel letter or not.
The convention of using both  and  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 , remained unchanged, , were now (without any change of sound) spelled , and ; even  ('knight') was subsequently changed to  and  ('thick') changed to  or .
The Old English  was also at length displaced by the French  so that the Old English  ('queen') and  ('quick') became Middle English  and , respectively.
The sound , to which Old English palatalized  had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly from Latin  before .
In French it was represented by the digraph , as in champ (from Latin ) and this spelling was introduced into English: the Hatton Gospels, written , have in Matt.
i-iii, , for the  of the Old English version whence they were copied.
In these cases, the Old English  gave way to ,  and ; on the other hand,  in its new value of  appeared largely in French words like  and , and was also substituted for  in a few Old English words, as , in early Middle English .
By the end of the thirteenth century both in France and England, this sound  de-affricated to ; and from that time  has represented  before front vowels either for etymological reasons, as in lance, cent, or to avoid the ambiguity due to the "etymological" use of  for , 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 .
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  takes on either a "hard" or "soft" value depending on the following letter.
Pronunciation and use
Pronunciations of Cc
English
In English orthography,  generally represents the "soft" value of  before the letters  (including the Latin-derived digraphs  and , or the corresponding ligatures  and ), , and , and a "hard" value of  before any other letters or at the end of a word.
However, there are a number of exceptions in English: "soccer" and "Celt" are words that have  where  would be expected.
The "soft"  may represent the  sound in the digraph  when this precedes a vowel, as in the words 'delicious' and 'appreciate', and also in the word "ocean" and its derivatives.
The digraph  most commonly represents , but can also represent  (mainly in words of Greek origin) or  (mainly in words of French origin).
For some dialects of English, it may also represent  in words like loch, while other speakers pronounce the final sound as .
The trigraph  always represents .
The digraph  is often used to represent the sound   after short vowels, like "wicket".
C is the eleventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after G, Y, P, B, V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 2.20% in words.
Other languages
In the Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese,  generally has a "hard" value of  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  value is  as it is in English.
In the Spanish spoken in most of Spain, the soft  is a voiceless dental fricative .
In Italian and Romanian, the soft  is .
Germanic languages usually use c for Romance loans or digraphs, such as  and , but the rules vary across languages.
Dutch uses  the most, for all Romance loans and the digraph , but unlike English, does not use  for native Germanic words like komen, "come".
German uses  in the digraphs  and , and the trigraph , but only by itself in unassimilated loanwords and place names.
Danish keeps soft  in Romance words but changes hard  to .
Swedish has the same rules for soft and hard  as Danish, and also uses  in the digraph  and the very common word och, "and".
Norwegian, Afrikaans, and Icelandic are the most restrictive, replacing all cases of  with  or , and reserving  for unassimilated loanwords and names.
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 (and those aboriginal languages of North America whose practical orthography derives from it) use  to represent , the voiceless alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant affricate.
In Hanyu Pinyin, the standard romanization of Mandarin Chinese, the letter represents an aspirated version of this sound, .
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet,  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, Crimean Tatar, Kurmanji Kurdish, and Turkish  stands for the voiced counterpart of this sound, the voiced postalveolar affricate .
In Yabem and similar languages, such as Bukawa,  stands for a glottal stop .
Xhosa and Zulu use this letter to represent the click .
In some other African languages, such as Berber languages,  is used for .
In Fijian,  stands for a voiced dental fricative , while in Somali it has the value of .
The letter  is also used as a transliteration of Cyrillic  in the Latin forms of Serbian, Macedonian, and sometimes Ukrainian, along with the digraph .
Other systems
As a phonetic symbol, lowercase  is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal plosive, and capital  is the X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal fricative.
Digraphs
There are several common digraphs with , the most common being , which in some languages (such as German) is far more common than  alone.
takes various values in other languages.
As in English, , with the value , is often used after short vowels in other Germanic languages such as German and Swedish (other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Norwegian, use  instead).
The digraph  is found in Polish and  in Hungarian, representing  and  respectively.
The digraph  represents  in Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian (where this only happens before front vowels, while otherwise it represents ).
The trigraph  represents  in German.
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
𐤂 : Semitic letter Gimel, from which the following symbols originally derive
: Greek letter Gamma, from which C derives
G g : Latin letter G, which is derived from Latin C
Ȝ ȝ : Latin letter Ȝ, which is derived from Latin G
Phonetic alphabet symbols related to C:
: Small c with curl
ʗ : stretched C
ᶜ : Modifier letter small c
ᶝ : Modifier letter small c with curl
ᴄ : Small capital c is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.
Ꞔ ꞔ : C with palatal hook, used for writing Mandarin Chinese using the early draft version of pinyin romanization during the mid-1950s
Add to C with diacritics
C with diacritics: Ć ć Ĉ ĉ Č č Ċ ċ Ḉ ḉ Ƈ ƈ C̈ c̈ Ȼ ȼ Ç ç Ꞔ ꞔ Ꞓ ꞓ
Ↄ ↄ : Claudian letters
Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols
© : copyright symbol
℃ : degree Celsius
¢ : cent
₡ : colón (currency)
₢ : Brazilian cruzeiro (currency)
₵ : Ghana cedi (currency)
₠ : European Currency Unit CE
\mathbb{C} : blackboard bold C, denoting the complex numbers
ℭ : blackletter C
Ꜿ ꜿ : Medieval abbreviation for Latin syllables con- and com-, Portuguese -us and -os
Computing codes
1
In Unicode, C is also encoded in various font styles for mathematical purposes; see Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols.
Other representations
See also
Hard and soft C
Speed of light, c
References
External links
