C is the third
letter in the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
cee, plural
cees.
History
C comes from the same letter as
G or
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.
In the
Etruscan language,
plosive consonants had no contrastive
voicing, so the
Greek Γ (Gamma) was adopted into the
Etruscan alphabet to represent the phoneme. Already in the
Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a
form in Early Etruscan, then
in Classical Etruscan. In Early Latin it took a form then C in Classical Latin. In the earliest
Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel, K before /a/, and C elsewhere. During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for , and C itself retained for . 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
phonetic representative of "gamma", and C as the equivalent of "kappa", in the transliteration of Greek words into Roman spelling, as in "
KA∆MOΣ, KYPOΣ, ΦΩKIΣ," in Roman letters "CADMVS, CYRVS, PHOCIS". It is also possible but uncertain that C represented only at a very early time, while
K might have been used for .
Other alphabets have letters identical to C in form but not in use and derivation, in particular the
Cyrillic letter
Es which derives from one form of the Greek letter
sigma, known as the "lunate sigma" 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, c, is still only . The
Old English or "
Anglo-Saxon" writing was learned from the Celts, apparently of Ireland; hence C, c, in Old English, also originally represented : the words
kin, break, broken, thick, seek, were in Old English written
cyn, brecan, brocen, Þicc, séoc. But during the course of the Old English period, before front vowels ( and ) was
palatalized, having, by the 10th century, advanced nearly or quite to the sound of , though still written c, as in
cir(i)ce, wrecc(e)a. On the continent, meanwhile, a similar phonetic change had also been going on (for example, in
Italian).
Original Latin before front vowels had palatalized in Italy to the sound of , and in France and the Iberian peninsula to that of . Yet for these new sounds the old character C, c, was still retained before
e and
i, the letter thus represented two distinct values. Moreover the Latin phoneme (represented by QV, or
qu) 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 . These French inconsistencies as to C and K were, after the
Norman Conquest, applied to the writing of English, which caused a considerable re-spelling of the Old English words. Thus while Old English
candel, clif, corn, crop, cú, remained unchanged,
Cent, cæ´
(cé´), cyng, brece, séoce, were now (without any change of sound) spelt
Kent, keȝ, kyng, breke, seoke; even
cniht was subsequently spelt
kniht, knight, and
þic, þicc, became
thik, thikk, thick. The Old English cw- was also at length displaced by the French
qw, qu, so that the Old English
cwén, cwic, became
Middle English qwen, quen, qwik, quik, now
queen, quick. The sound to which Old English palatalized c had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly (in Central French) from Latin
c before
a. In French it was represented by
ch, as in
champ, cher:–Latin
camp-um, caōr-um; and this spelling was now 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 13th century both in France and England, this sound de-affricated to ; and from that date c before front vowels has been, phonetically, a duplicate or subsidiary letter to s; used either for
etymological reasons, as in
lance, cent, or (in defiance of etymology) 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
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.
In English,
French,
Spanish and
Portuguese, C takes the "hard" value finally and before A, O, and U, and a "soft" value before E and I. However, as with everything else regarding English spelling, there are a couple of exceptions: "
soccer" and "
Celt" are words that have a
k sound in the "wrong" place.
The pronunciation of the "soft" value varies by language. In English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish from Latin America and southern Spain, C before E and I sounds . In the Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain it is pronounced as the
voiceless dental fricative . In
Italian and
Romanian it is pronounced .
Other languages use C with different values, such as in
Fijian; in
Somali; the click in
Xhosa and
Zulu; in
Turkish,
Kurdish,
Tatar, and
Azeri; in
Indonesian,
Malay,
Volapük, and a number of African languages such as
Hausa,
Fula, and
Manding; in some other African languages, such as Beninese
Yoruba; in all
Balto-Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, as well as
Albanian,
Esperanto,
Hungarian,
Ido, and
Interlingua; and in
Romanized Chinese. It is also used as a transliteration of the Cyrillic "Ц" in the Latinic forms of
Serbian,
Macedonian, and sometimes
Ukrainian (along with 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. In English, CH most commonly takes the value (which it invariably has in
Spanish), but can take the value or ; some dialects of English also have in words like
loch where other speakers pronounce the final sound as . CH takes various values in other languages, such as in the
West Slavic languages (e.g.
Polish,
Czech and
Slovak); , , or in German; or silent in
Dutch; in
French and
Portuguese; in Interlingua and Italian, in
Mandarin Chinese; and so forth. CK, with the value , is often used after short vowels in
Germanic languages such as English, German and
Swedish (but some other Germanic languages use KK instead, such as Dutch and
Norwegian). The digraph CZ is found in Polish and CS in Hungarian, both representing . In Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian, sc represents (however in Italian and related languages this only happens before e or i, otherwise it represents ).
As a
phonetic symbol, lowercase c is the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and
X-SAMPA symbol for the
voiceless palatal plosive, and capital C is the X-SAMPA symbol for the
voiceless palatal fricative.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the
capital C is codepoint U+0043 and the
lower case c is U+0063.
The
ASCII code for capital C is 67 and for lower case c is 99; or in
binary 01000011 and 01100011, respectively.
The
EBCDIC code for capital C is 195 and for lowercase c is 131.
The
numeric character references in
HTML and
XML are "
C" and "
c" for upper and lower case, respectively.
See also
- Cyrillic C (Es). С, с are identical in shape with the Latin C,c but are equivalents of the Latin S, s.
- (cruzeiro currency symbol)
- (C with Macron) (hardly-used)
