thereâs an observation that Iâve heard
a number of people make about the letter C, and one that I do not agree with. âin Englishâ, people argue, âthe letter
C is completely redundant, and the alphabet doesnât need it. after all,â, they then go on to explain,
âC has two main sounds that it represents, both of which are covered by other less ambiguous
letters. we could make English spelling far more regular
and consistent by removing the letter C altogether, and replacing it with either K or S, depending
on its pronunciation.â this is incorrect. while there are certainly some languages where
you could remove the letter C without needing to fundamentally change the way spelling works,
English is not one of them. English orthography is a very complex system
with a large number of interlocking parts. you cannot simply remove the letter C without
completely reworking everything else around it. and to what end? to remove the ambiguity between
âhard Câ and âsoft Câ? true, there are some words where the pronunciation
of C is unclear, but very few of them are ones where merely replacing C with K or S
would actually make it possible to determine pronunciation from spelling. the letter Câs reputation among English
speakers of being unnecessary is shared with very few other letters, and even though the
argument for C being a redundant letter is much weaker than the arguments against Q or
X, C is still the letter that the most people have made this claim about. and itâs a shame, because C is a lovely
letter! both aesthetically and functionally, Iâm a big fan. perhaps what people need is to understand
how we got here, where this letter came from, and why its different pronunciations exist. that way, we can gain an appreciation for
this underlooked letter. Iâm jan Misali, and this is the story of
C. I already talked about the history of the
Latin alphabet in depth in my video about the letter W, but itâll still be useful
to start at the beginning. about four thousand years ago, the Proto-Sinaitic
script was invented, most likely inspired by the much older Egyptian hieroglyphs. the Proto-Sinaitic script was the common ancestor
of what is today the single largest family of writing systems in the world. each letter of the script was a simple drawing
of something with a name that starts with the same sound the letter represents. the reason itâs assumed that Proto-Sinaitic
was in some way based on Egypitan hieroglyphs is that the majority of letters used in the
script had corresponding characters used in Egyptian. the two writing systems were used for different
languages, and the phonetic value of each letter in Proto-Sinaitic was based on its
name in the Northwest Semitic language the script was designed for rather than its phonetic
value in Egyptian, and as such the link between the two writing systems is purely visual,
rather than structural. nonetheless, there was one Egyptian hieroglyph
that will be very relevant to our story. like most hieroglyphs, it had a few different
ways it could be read. this character represented a throwstick, ê„mê„êŁt,
but it was also commonly used for the verb qmêŁ, which meant âthrowâ, or âcreateâ.
this throwstick is the earliest ancestor of the modern letter C. the Proto-Sinaitic script also happened to
contain a letter representing a throwstick, one with a similarly simple shape, but at
a different orientation. this is the letter gaml. in the Proto-Sinaitic
script, as in the many Semitic abjads that descend from it, it represented the consonant
sound /ÉĄ/. while gaml is the direct ancestor of C, the
story of C would be incomplete if all we did was examine its direct lineage. in fact, it
will be helpful to examine the entire Proto-Sinaitic script as a whole system. several letters here will be directly relevant
to the story of C later down the line. over the course of many centuries, the Proto-Sinaitic
script slowly changed and diverged into many different daughter writing systems. the one which is most relevant to our story,
as you may already know, is the Phoenician alphabet. at some point along the way from Proto-Sinaitic
to the Phoenician alphabet, the letter gaml was renamed to gīml, which also stopped meaning
âthrowstickâ. the orientation changed back to something more like the original hieroglyph
that came before it. most retellings of the history of the Latin
alphabet start around here, with the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn was the basis of the
Greek alphabet. but itâs important to remember that this
story is not a linear progression. this is not the story of the evolution from the primitive
pictographic representations of language made by a stone-age pre-literate society to the
advanced civilized system of writing we have today, nor is it the story of how the pure
written language of our ancestors degraded over time to a corrupted form in use now. the creation of the Proto-Sinaitic script,
its development into the Phoenician alphabet, and especially the later developments of the
Greek, Etruscan, and Latin alphabets, as much as our modern perspective might make it seem,
was not a straight path through history, and the Latin alphabet was not the singular endpoint. the descendants of Proto-Sinaitic comprise
the largest family of writing systems in use in the modern world, and the thousands of
years of divergent histories have resulted in a beautiful diversity of scripts, each
one with a story just as rich as that of the Latin alphabet. however, we must stay focused. this is the story of not the entire Latin
alphabet, but just a single letter within it, remember? Phoenician and Ancient Greek were very different
languages. the twenty two consonant letters of the Phoenician
alphabet included letters for many sounds that the Greek language simply did not contain. the earliest form of the Greek alphabet repurposed
many of these extra letters for additional phonemes found in Ancient Greek that were
not present in Phoenician, but some pairs of letters represented the same sounds as
each other, preserving a distinction found in Phoenician that the Greeks had no use for. for instance, the four distinct sibilant consonants
in Phoenician had their values changed considerably. one letter, sÄmek, was dropped altogether,
and the remaining two voiceless sibilants now both represented /s/, which was the very
phoneme sÄmek had originally represented. and as for the voiced sibilant, zayin, the
pronunciation of its descendant in this very early form of the Greek alphabet is uncertain. many linguists have suggested that the most
likely pronunciation was the consonant cluster /sd/, while others claim it was more likely
to have been the affricate /dÍĄz/. it could also be the case that both pronunciations
coexisted in different parts of Greece, and that neither is more âcorrectâ than the
other. more relevant to the story of C, however,
is the pair of consonants that would come to be known as kappa and koppa, both of which
represented the voiceless velar plosive /k/. in Phoenician, the letters kÄp and qĆp were
used for a velar /k/ and a uvular /q/, respectively. this uvular consonant would have been completely
unfamiliar to anyone who spoke Ancient Greek as their sole language, and they probably
had a difficult time hearing the difference between these two sounds. however, since a uvular consonant requires
the back of the tongue to make contact with the uvula, this has a noticeable effect on
the sound of nearby vowels within a word. perhaps because of this, the letter koppa
was used, for a time, to represent the same consonant sound as kappa whenever it occurred
before back rounded vowels, such as /u/ or /o/. not quite the same distribution it had in
Phoenician, but it is similar. this use of koppa did not last terribly long,
and the letter would eventually be dropped from the Greek alphabet entirely, but this
short-lived letter would come to have a direct effect on the way the Latin alphabet is still
used today. by the way, our friend gīml, you might have
noticed, made its way into the Greek alphabet more or less fully preserved. its shape and pronunciation are almost completely
unchanged. however, if you know what the Greek alphabet
looks like in modern times, it might seem like this letter is backwards. in fact, many
letters appear to be backwards. were they flipped horizontally at one point? as a matter of fact, they were. now is a good time to bring up one aspect
of these scripts that Iâve neglected to mention up until this point: directionality. the Latin alphabet, and indeed the current
Greek alphabet, are both written from left to right. as you know, this is not universal among all
writing systems. the Semitic abjads in use today, such as the
Arabic script, are generally written in the opposite direction, from right to left. even though these scripts share a common ancestor,
a design aspect as fundamental as what direction to read in is completely reversed. how can this be? this discrepancy has its origin all the way
back at the source, Egyptian hieroglyphs. the intricate designs of hieroglyphs were
commonly shown inline with full illustrations of what the text was saying. while the more common default order was for
text to be written from right to left, when paired with these illustrations, it was common
to have the characters of the text face the same direction as the characters in the illustration
for aesthetic purposes, which meant that sometimes text ran from left to right instead. this free directionality was copied by the
Proto-Sinaitic script, and consequently inherited into Phoenician, and then into Greek. along the way, however, the preferred default
directionality changed from RTL to LTR, but in this earliest stage of the Greek alphabet,
both directionalities were used. letâs not get ahead of ourselves. after all, the Ancient Greek language still
had a decent number of phonemes that still did not have letters. as Iâve already discussed thoroughly, a
semi-new letter named wau was used for the semivowel /w/ that would letter disappear
from the Greek language altogether. and, while the Phoenician emphatic alveolar
stop was reused for the Ancient Greek aspirated alveolar stop, new letters would still need
to be created for the other two aspirated stops that were in the language at the time. one of these letters was phi. and as for the other one, well, this is where
things begin to diverge. in some parts of Ancient Greece, a letter you might know as
chi was added for this velar aspirate. while this was more than sufficient to represent
the consonant phonemes of the version of Greek spoken at the time, for somewhat complicated
reasons, a pair of additional consonants were also added to represent the consonant clusters
/ps/ and /ks/, with the letter for /ks/ bringing back the shape of the once-discarded Phoenician
letter sÄmek. with our modern understanding of phonetics,
itâs easy to look back at the Ancient Greeks figuring out this whole alphabet thing and
say they clearly didnât need these letters, that thereâs no way they could have considered
any of these clusters to be single sounds in their own right. however, when examining the phonological history
of the Greek language, these particular consonant sequences did, in a sense, behave as single
units. not phonetically, not even phonemically, but
when examining the structures of words themselves, you could certainly justify interpreting them
in this way. this particular form of the archaic Greek
alphabet was used in Ionia, and would go on to become the standard alphabet used throughout
Greece to this day. however, this is not the version of the Greek
alphabet that the Latin alphabet descends from. that alphabet was the one used in Western
Greece, sometimes distinguished from the other Greek alphabet as the âCumaean alphabetâ.
the letter it used for the aspirated velar plosive was one which had the same shape as
the early version of psi found in other parts of Greece. and while this alphabet had no letter to represent
/ps/, it made use of a letter shaped the same as the Eastern chi to represent /ks/. Iâm not entirely sure what the circumstances
of this switcheroo were. which of these implementations of these new
letters came first? it probably doesnât matter. whatâs relevant to our story is that this,
the Cumaean alphabet, is the version of the Greek alphabet that the Etruscans used to
write their language. and it is here, with the adaptation of the
Greek alphabet for Etruscan language, where some of the most relevant things to the story
of the letter C happened. most visibly, this is when the Greek gamma
takes on a shape without the angle that originally defined the throwstick it descends from. along with many other letters, its shape becomes
softer and more rounded, transforming into something nearly identical to the Latin letter
C. not much is known about Etruscan, but it is
known that it was a very different language from Ancient Greek, just as different as Greek
was from Phoenician. in terms of its consonant inventory, the Ancient Greek language contained
three series of plosives, distinguished by voicing and aspiration. Phoenician, and Latin for that matter, distinguished
stops only by voicedness, and Etruscan, in contrast, distinguished only aspiration. because of this, the letters representing
voiced stops in Ancient Greek, beta, delta, and gamma, were all pronounced the same way
in Etruscan as their corresponding voiceless unaspirated stops, pi, tau, and kappa. this doubling up with letters for tenuis stops
was at its most extreme with the letters for /k/, since Greek already used two different
letters for this phoneme. and so, a three-way distinction in Phoenician was transferred
into Greek as a two-way distinction, and then into Etruscan as three separate letters for
one consonant. just like the early Greek alphabet they were
copying, the earliest form of the Etruscan alphabet used their version of koppa to represent
/k/ when it occurred before back rounded vowels. as for the Ancient Greek voicedness pairs,
Etruscan preserved them when writing Greek words, but as these distinctions did not exist
in native Etruscan words, one letter in each pair was used as the default. while eventually these extra letters would
be dropped from the Etruscan alphabet altogether, their presence in this earlier form is extremely
relevant to this story. these letters which were used meaningfully
for Greek but not for Etruscan turned out to be very useful for the Italic tribes who
learned how to write from the Etruscans. these Old Italic languages, the most historically
relevant of which being Old Latin, had two stop series distinguished by voicedness and
not aspiration. and it is here where we can finally answer
the single most important question about the role the letter C has in the Latin alphabet. âwhy does the Latin alphabet contain three
separate letters that all represent the sound /k/?â while in the present, millennia removed from
the initial invention of the Latin alphabet, the letters C, K, and Q are very often used
for different things, Latin, at the point its alphabet was first invented, used all
three of them for the same sound. or, actually, âsoundsâ. when the Latins were first taught how to write,
the Etruscans who explained it to them knew that the extra letters in their alphabet were
used by the Greeks to represent sounds the Etruscan language did not have, and they also
knew what those sounds were. they probably explained it like this: âthis
is the letter for /p/, this is the letter the Greeks use for /b/. this is the letter
for /t/, this is the letter the Greeks use for /d/. this is the letter for /k/, and this
is the letter the Greeks use for /k/.â for two of the voicedness pairs, pi and beta,
tau and delta, the letter only used in Greek words happened to be the voiced one, but for
the other pair, kappa and gamma, it was the voiceless one that was exclusive to Greek
words. and as such, the way the alphabet was explained
by the Etruscans would have involved providing the same pronunciation for both letters. and, as a result, all three letters were used
in Old Latin for both /k/ and /ÉĄ/. and once again, from our modern perspective,
itâs easy for us to look back at this and say âoh, those pre-literate Italic peoples
messed up. they should have noticed the pattern and realized
that kappa and gamma were another voicedness pair, and that kappa was the voiceless one
and gamma was the voiced one.â but thereâs a few things worth keeping in
mind. first, the Etruscans would not have organized
these letters according to their pronunciations. phonetics as a field of study almost certainly
did not exist yet. the earliest known examples of people analyzing
the sounds of speech happened in India about a hundred years after the creation of the
Latin alphabet. additionally, one of the most persistent features
of the alphabet is its order. as much as the shapes and phonetic values
of the letters changed, the alphabetical order was preserved at each step in the chain from
Phoenician to Old Latin. so, itâs reasonable to guess that the alphabet
was explained in this order, making redundancies much harder to notice. regardless of how it happened or whose fault
it was, the Old Italic alphabet ended up with three separate letters which all were used
for the sounds /k/ and /ÉĄ/ interchangeably, the letters that would go on to become C,
K, and Q. well, not quite interchangeably. as the Etruscans
did before them, the Latins used the letter Q whenever either velar plosive occurred before
a rounded vowel, and they also used K before /a/. this distribution of the letter K was also
found to some extent in Etruscan, though it wasnât as present as the rule of using Q
before rounded vowels, and this use of K in Latin didnât stick around for too long either. as time progressed, Latin writers began to
prefer using C over K in all contexts, but the use of Q stuck around. this is because Latin had a pair of labialized
velar stops, that is, consonants pronounced with rounded lips, /kÊ·/ and /ÉĄÊ·/. both of
these consonants would be written with the digraph QV. with Q given a proper purpose and K nearly
abandoned, the problem of redundancy was replaced with a new problem of ambiguity, one which
would eventually be corrected. in the negative third century, the letter
Z was officially removed from the Latin alphabet throughout the Roman Republic. this is credited to Appius Claudius the Blind,
a Roman Censor who just really didnât like the letter Z. I donât know exactly why he didnât like
the letter Z. at the time, Z was the seventh letter of the alphabet, like its ancestors
were in the scripts the Latin alphabet was descended from. in Etruscan, this letter probably represented
the affricate /tÍĄs/, a sound which did not exist in Old Latin, but did exist in other
Italic languages spoken at the time, and those languages used the letter Z for that specific
sound. despite this, there are multiple sources Iâve
found that claim that the sound Z represented in minus third century Latin was the same
as its modern value, [z]. this sound too did not exist in Latin at the time, although it
had in the past. in some contexts, the voiceless sibilant /s/
would become voiced to [z], specifically when it occurred between vowels. this pronunciation was entirely predictable
from context within a word, and wasnât considered to be a separate phoneme, that is, a meaningfully
different sound. later, this voiced sibilant became a trill,
[r], a sound shift known as rhoticization. this change was reflected in the spelling
of words; there are some words which were spelled with an S in Old Latin that in later
texts are spelled with an R instead. and so, some claim that this event is why
the letter Z was unnecessary for writing Latin by the time of the censorship of Appius the
Blind. however, Iâm not entirely convinced that
this is true. Iâm by no means a historian, and there is
a good chance that someone with more expertise in the history of this specific time period
would be able to correct me on this, but I havenât seen any evidence of there being
a point where these words, the ones where [z] became [r], were at any point spelled
with the letter Z in Latin. all I can find is texts where they are spelled
with S, and later texts where they are spelled with R, with no medial stage where they are
spelled with Z. given the pronunciation of Z as /tÍĄs/ in
other Italic languages at the time, I find it more likely that that is the pronunciation
that Appius associated with the letter, and the fact that it did not occur in Latin words
would have been the reason he considered it unnecessary. regardless of what reasons he may have had,
Appiusâs distaste for the letter Z is today credited as the reason why it was removed
from the Latin alphabet. Appius was, after all, very influential. an influencer, if you will, and his belief
that this letter ought to be removed resulted in it being dropped from the alphabet. however, without Z, the alphabet suddenly
had an opening for a new seventh letter. and this is where the true hero of our story comes
in: the elementary school teacher, Spurius Carvilius Ruga. yes, apparently, there were elementary schools
in the Roman Republic. Wikipedia confidently claims with no inline
citation that Ruga was the first person in recorded history to open a private elementary
school. this put him in a uniquely powerful position. Ruga was one of the first people to ever be
responsible for teaching the Latin alphabet to a group of children. in the process of teaching the alphabet, Ruga
became extremely aware of a flaw with the design of the alphabet itself, that the letter
C was used for two separate sounds, /k/ and /ÉĄ/, with no way of knowing which one it
represented in any given word. it certainly helped that his name was Ruga,
and that from its spelling in the orthography of the time, R-V-C-A, it was impossible to
tell if it was pronounced /ruÉĄa/ or /ruka/. and, as the story goes, Ruga solved this problem
by inventing a new letter, one which would fill the hole left behind by the removal of
Z, which was still pretty recent at that point. by simply adding an extra line to the letter
C, you could now specify unambiguously when a word contains the voiced /ÉĄ/, as opposed
to the voiceless /k/. however, Ruga wasnât the first person to
ever use this letter. he didnât actually invent it himself. but, because of his uniquely powerful position
as one of the very first elementary school teachers in the Roman Republic, the exact
way Ruga used G, as a new seventh letter of the alphabet to replace Z, became the new
standard. there was, of course, another perhaps simpler
way it could have happened. âif only Ruga had knownâ, we might say,
âthat this distinction between /k/ and /ÉĄ/ had already been solved! the fully redundant
letter K, which nobody really still used, could have been brought back to now exclusively
represent /k/, and then C could have been used for the missing voiced /ÉĄ/.â however, this was not to be, and using the
letter K wasnât even considered as a possibility. in fact, itâs easy to imagine a version
of history where Appius the Blindâs suggested reforms to the alphabet also removed the letter
K from the alphabet, as it too was unnecessary to write Latin words. in the centuries to come, the Roman Republic
transformed into the Roman Empire. and, with the conquest of Greece, the relationship between
the Greek and Latin alphabets changed. a pair of letters were added to the end of
the alphabet, to be used exclusively for writing Greek words in the Latin script. and with
that, after having been absent from the alphabet for a couple hundred years, the letter Z returned. or, should I say âzedâ? at some point
in the cultural exchange process between the Cumaean alphabet and the Old Latin alphabet,
the notion that every letter has its own unique name was lost, and letters were instead given
simple names according to the sounds they represented, most of which naturally evolved
into the current English names of the letters. but the pair of Greek letters added to the
end of the alphabet represented sounds that were not present in Latin to begin with, so
rather than names based on their pronunciations, they were given names reflecting their Greek
origins. for the reintroduced Z, its name was zeta, loaned from its name in Ancient
Greek. but thatâs zed, [beat] with the introduction of G, the letter C finally
no longer represented two separate sounds. however, this wouldnât last. as the Roman Empire fell, the Latin once spoken
all throughout Europe branched off into the Romance languages. one major difference in pronunciation between
the Romance languages and Latin is a dramatic sound shift known as palatalization. in the development of the Romance languages,
palatalization was a sound shift that caused some consonants to be pronounced differently
when they occurred before front vowels, /i/ and /e/. this appears in every modern Romance
language to some extent, and in almost all of them, it resulted in multiple pronunciations
of the letters C and G depending on what vowel comes after them. and, to be clear, English is not one of these
languages. English is not descended from Latin. while English is distantly related to the
Romance languages, English is not itself a Romance language. in summary, /k/ and /ÉĄ/ before front vowels
became the affricates [tÍĄs] and [dÍĄÊ] in the medieval common ancestor of Western Romance
languages. this is what created âsoft Câ and âsoft
Gâ. this use of C and G, with two separate pronunciations each, was copied directly into
Middle English. Middle English spelling was based directly
on Old French, and Modern English spelling is inherited directly from Middle English. of course, since which pronunciation either
letter had in Old French, as well as other Romance languages, could usually be reliably
predicted from context, this was fine, and didnât really cause problems. not yet, anyway. however, grafting this orthography onto a
non-Romance language, like Middle English, would and in fact did cause problems, and
directly created some of the most-debated ambiguous spellings in Modern English to this
day. without having the same phonological history,
it was like, completely normal for English words to have velar stops before front vowels,
and spelling these according to Old French rules required a workaround. in some languages that started using the Latin
alphabet at around the same time, spelling words in a way that made sense to speakers
of Romance languages wasnât a priority, and so they avoided this problem by simply
not worrying about it. this approach can be seen in some Celtic languages,
which, for example, use the letter C for /k/ regardless of context. for Middle English, spelling words in a way
that would be intuitive to speakers of Old French was considered very important, and
so using C for /k/ before front vowels was heavily avoided, as this would have been misinterpreted
as meaning [tÍĄs], or, once the pronunciations of the soft consonants shifted, as [s]. to
solve this, the letter K, which was used rarely if ever in Old French, was dusted off and
repurposed as a less ambiguous alternative to be used for these words. this solution of using K as a less ambiguous
option for writing /k/ is found in many languages, and indeed itâs commonplace to avoid using
C for /k/ altogether. however, as youâve surely noticed, soft
C is one of a pair of soft consonants built in to the Latin alphabet. the other is soft G, and unlike C, there isnât
an extra unused letter that can take its place. while this isnât an unsolvable problem,
no solution at all was used for Middle English. and directly because of this careless oversight,
one of the most infamously ambiguous aspects of English spelling was created, which in
recent decades has been the subject of one of the least productive debates in online
discourse. and itâs a little bit strange, I think,
that despite both C and G having multiple pronunciations in English for the exact same
reason, and despite the fact that between the two C is clearly the less ambiguous one,
C is the letter that gets all of the unwarranted hate! sure, maybe having both C and K might
seem a little redundant, but Iâd take redundancy over ambiguity any day. and, in fact, the commonly suggested quote
unquote âsolutionâ of replacing C with either K or S depending on the word would
cause English spelling to become far more ambiguous. even ignoring the countless words where C
is pronounced as something that isnât /k/ or /s/, âsoft Câ is uniformly pronounced
more consistently than S in the same contexts. S is often voiced, /z/, while soft C is pretty
much always voiceless, /s/. when S occurs between vowels, itâs actually very hard
to predict if itâs pronounced as /s/ or /z/, to the point where thereâs some words
where the pronunciation of S is dependant entirely on the way the word is being used,
and not reflected by spelling whatsoever. compare the noun âhouseâ to the verb âhouseâ. by replacing soft C with S, it would be introducing
even more of this ambiguity to English spelling, despite being a change proposed as a way to
make spelling more consistent. removing the letter C would require changing
everything else around it. and itâs not even really necessary. there are a lot of things that are strange
and irregular about English spelling, but the two separate pronunciations of C are far
from the worst case of this, or even really an example of something irregular in English
spelling in the first place. there is one more use of the letter C in English
that is very important, and one that even those who claim C is redundant concede as
a core part of its role in our orthography, and that is the digraph CH. in English, CH is generally used in two separate
mostly unrelated ways. the first, much older use is for transcribing
Greek words. in Latin, the aspirated stop consonants in
Ancient Greek were transcribed according to what they sounded like. they were pronounced as voiceless consonants
but breathier, so they were spelled as voiceless consonants followed by H. this is where the
digraphs PH, TH, and CH all come from. in Ancient Greek words that made their way
into Modern English, CH is pronounced like /k/, similar to its pronunciation in Ancient
Greek. although, PH and TH are pronounced as fricatives,
/f/ and /Ξ/, with TH in particular being used all the time in native English words
that contain dental fricatives. this use is derived from the pronunciations of these consonants
in Modern Greek, where Ancient /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ naturally evolved into the fricatives /f Ξ
x/. in some languages, such as German, the digraph CH is used for the velar fricative
/x/ for this same reason. the other way CH is used in English is, like
many other aspects of English spelling, borrowed from Old French. while almost all Romance languages went through
palatalization of /k/ before the vowels /i/ and /e/, French specifically went even further,
with /k/ becoming [tÍĄÊ] before the open vowel /a/. importantly, this was pronounced differently
both from both hard C and soft C, and since this context wasnât a normal position for
palatalization to occur in other Romance languages, it was considered necessary to respell this
new [tÍĄÊ] whenever it occurred. and the solution used was the digraph CH. in French itself, this would eventually change
to be pronounced as /Ê/ instead, but the use of CH for /tÍĄÊ/ in Old French was copied
directly into Middle English, inherited into Modern English, and from its use in Modern
English copied into many other languages. there is something that I find fascinating
about this, however. as you may recall, all the way back in Old
Latin, K was the letter used whenever /k/ or /ÉĄ/ appeared before /a/. and thatâs
the exact same context where /k/ palatalized to /tÍĄÊ/ in old French! if the use of the
letter K before /a/ had never fallen out of fashion in the Roman Republic, speakers of
Old French wouldnât have needed to come up with a new way to represent the sound /tÍĄÊ/,
because it would have already been written with its own separate letter before the sound
shift even happened. if this had been the case, weâd almost certainly
use K for the sound /tÍĄÊ/ in English, and use C just as ambiguously as G. throughout
the whole history of the alphabet, there are so many minor things like that that would
have resulted in massively different modern spellings if they had been even slightly different. in the present day, C is used in a wide variety
of ways. some languages imitate the hard C / soft C
paradigm found in Romance languages the same way English does, as seen in languages from
Vietnamese to Classical Nahuatl. others take the redundancy of C, K, and Q
and repurpose the extra letters for sounds that would otherwise be hard to represent,
taking advantage of the multitude of ways that C has been used. in languages like Polish, C is used for /tÍĄs/,
like the soft C of early Western Romance languages. a similar use of C is found in Pinyin, the
standard way of transcribing Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet. Pinyin also makes the very bold aesthetic
choice to use Q for /tÍĄÉÊ°/, a sound which formed from Mandarinâs own palatalization
sound shift that effected /kʱ/ when it appeared before /i/. many dislike this use of Q in Pinyin, but
theyâre all wrong. it makes perfect sense given the phonological
history of the language, and it looks rad as heck. there is no limit to how deeply you could
explore this. the history of writing is as old as history
itself. the little idiosyncrasies found in the Latin
alphabet are, in many ways, what give it its own charm, and this isnât unique to this
one alphabet. every writing system has its own quirks, and
especially writing systems that are thousands of years old. the Latin alphabet probably isnât suited
for its role as the dominant writing system used worldwide. while it fits the Romance languages that naturally
descend from the language it was initially designed for just fine, there are compromises
involved in getting it to work for literally anything else. when a language like English embraces this
historical baggage, it might be frustrating to those attempting to learn the language,
but I think it makes things a lot more fun. you might not agree with me on that, and thatâs
fine. but maybe one day, youâll C. Iâve been jan Misali, and c- the letter c has folks saying
it should be removed that without it the alphabet
would be improved it's a common complaint
that's misguided at best no, you can't just replace c
with k and with s (no, you can't just replace c
with k and with s) you know s becomes voiced intervocalically
and suffixes preserve etymology if it's so inconsistent,
why focus on c when the quote unquote "problem"
is much worse with g if you were to cut c, then
what youâd have in store is youâre left with more problems
than you had before if you've learned nothing else,
just remember this English spelling reforms break
more than they can fix (English spelling reforms break
more than they can fix)
Crispin the comedian doesn't show up, though :(