Comments on: the history of the letter ‘C’

By: Debby Haas

Debby Haas — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:02:17 +0000

Is there a rule for when to spell a word with a K and when to use the hard letter C? thanks for the help.

By: neerja

neerja — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 10:24:06 +0000

can u please clarify how would the word “cueller” be pronounced? will it k sound or s sound? and why?

By: bilz tahir

bilz tahir — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:24:57 +0000

plz give the history of of letter y its kind n mere request.

By: Kelly Kofron

Kelly Kofron — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:06:40 +0000

Thanks for the letter “c” information. I’ve been searching for “k,” and I hadn’t thought to look for close relatives in my search until I found your post.

By: Charles Conrad

Charles Conrad — Tue, 06 Jan 2004 06:09:16 +0000

Whats the history of the letter J?

By: Katie Kavanagh

Katie Kavanagh — Sat, 13 Dec 2003 14:03:03 +0000

Thanks for the info on the letter C . Why ids it so hard to find information on the developement of letters on the net. Any help would be appriciated?

By: MALTP

MALTP — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 21:48:34 +0000

Oh, and there is a word “ce”…sort of. “c’è” means “there is”.

By: MALTP

MALTP — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 21:46:48 +0000

Actually, the rule for Italian is easy to remember. Before “i” or “e” (soft vowels) it’s the English “ch” sound, and before “a” “o” or “u” (hard vowels) it’s the English “k” sound. To get the English “ch” sound before a hard vowel, you throw an “i” after the “c” — like “ciao”. To get the “k” sound before a soft vowel, you throw an “h” in — like “chianti”. There’s one quirk: if there’s an “s” before the “c”, it’s an English “sh” sound if it’s followed by a soft vowel, and an English “sk” if it’s followed by a hard vowel — “prosciutto” and “scampi”.

This is the same for “g” (”spaghetti”, “Giovanni”, “gorgonzola” etc.). There’s no “s” quirk with “g”, but there is an “l” quirk: before a soft vowel, “gl” is pronounced sort of like an English “y” sound.

In Lojban, the “c” stands for the English “sh” sound.

And if your son decides that English spelling is stupid (and it is), have him check out Shavian, an alternate phonetic alphabet for English commissioned by George Bernard Shaw.

By: Oliver Steele

Oliver Steele — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 22:37:46 +0000

In Italian, “c” is pronounced [ʧ] (English “ch”) before “e”, “i”, and “y”, and [k] before any other letter — including “h”, which is otherwise silent.

This means that “ce” would be pronounced [ʧɛ], and “che” is pronounced [kɛ]. This is the opposite of English, and took us a while to get used to last month while we were in Italy.

(There isn’t actually an Italian word “ce”, but there is a “che”.)

By: P T Withington

P T Withington — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 19:16:57 +0000

Your son might be interested in this proposal: http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/spelling.html