C

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, Irish, Gaelic, ‹c› represents only /k/. The Old English or "Anglo-Saxon" writing 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. But 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, mean-while, a similar phonetic change had also been going on (for example, in Italian).

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.

In the orthographies of English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, ‹c› represents the "soft" value before ‹e› or ‹i› and a "hard" value of /k/ elsewhere. However, as with everything else regarding English spelling, there are a number of exceptions: "soccer" and "Celt" are words that have /k/ where /s/ would be expected.

Other language orthographies use ‹c› to represent other sounds

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.

In Unicode the capital C is codepoint U+0043 and the lower case c is U+0063.

The EBCDIC code for capital C is 195 and for lowercase c is 131.

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

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