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‹C› is the third letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English () is spelled cee, 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.
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 ‹ 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.
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 useWhen 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 ( and ) was palatalized, having changed by the tenth century to , 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 (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 ‹c› was still used before front vowels (‹e, i›) the letter thus represented two distinct values. Subsequently, the Latin phoneme (represented by ‹›) 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´ 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 the orthographies of English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, ‹c› represents the "soft" value before ‹e› or ‹i› and a "hard" value of elsewhere. However, as with everything else regarding English spelling, there are a number of exceptions: "soccer" and "Celt" are words that have where would be expected.
The pronunciation of the "soft" value varies by language. In the orthographies of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish from Latin America and southern Spain, the soft ‹c› value is . In the Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain, soft ‹c› is voiceless dental fricative . In Italian and Romanian soft ‹c› is .
Other language orthographies use ‹c› to represent other sounds
in Fijian
in Somali
The click in Xhosa and Zulu
in Turkish, Kurdish, Tatar, and Azeri
in Indonesian, Malay, and a number of African languages such as Hausa, Fula, and Manding
in some other African languages, such as Beninese Yoruba
in all Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, as well as Albanian, Esperanto, Hungarian, Ido, and Interlingua
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 the 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 represents (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 in Dutch
in French and Portuguese
in Interlingua and Italian
in Mandarin Chinese
‹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 front vowels, otherwise it represents ).
As a phonetic symbol, lowercase ‹› 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; or in binary 11000011 and 10000011, respectively.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "C" and "c" for upper and lower case, respectively.
See also
C (musical note)
¢ (cent)
Ç (cedilla)
Ĉ (C circumflex)
Č (C caron)
Ć (C acute)
Cyrillic C (Es). С, с are identical in shape with the Latin C,c but are equivalents of the Latin S, s.
Ц, ц - Tse (Cyrillic)
Ċ (C dot above)
(C hook)
(stretched C)
(C acute cedilla)
(colón currency symbol)
(cruzeiro currency symbol)
(double-struck C)
℃ (degree Celsius)
C++ (Computer programming code)
(Gothic C)
(Roman number C)
Hard and soft C
(enclosed C)
(enclosed c)
(C with Macron) (hardly-used)
References
Category:Latin letters
af:C
als:C
ar:C
an:C
arc:C
ast:C
az:C
zh-min-nan:C
be:C, літара
bs:C
br:C (lizherenn)
bg:C
ca:C
cs:C
co:C
cy:C
da:C
de:C
et:C
el:C
eml:C
es:C
eo:C
eu:C
fa:C
fr:C (lettre)
fy:C
fur:C
ga:C
gv:Couyll
gd:C
gl:C
gan:C
xal:C үзг
ko:C
hr:C
io:C
ilo:C
id:C
ia:C
is:C (bókstafur)
it:C
he:C
ka:C
kw:C
sw:C
ht:C
la:C
lv:C
lb:C
lt:C
lmo:C (letera)
hu:C
mk:C (Латиница)
mg:C
ms:C
my:C
nah:C
nl:C (letter)
ja:C
no:C
nn:C
nrm:C
uz:C (harf)
pl:C
pt:C
crh:C
ro:C
qu:C
ru:C (латиница)
se:C
stq:C
scn:C
simple:C
sk:C
sl:C
szl:C
sr:C (слово латинице)
sh:C
fi:C
sv:C
tl:C
th:C
tr:C (harf)
uk:C (латиниця)
vi:C
vo:C
wa:C
yi:C
yo:C
zh-yue:C
diq:C
bat-smg:C
zh:C
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