C

File:Copyright.svg

C in copyright symbol

C, or c, is the third letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is cee (pronounced Template:IPAc-en), plural cees.

History

Egyptian	Phoenician gaml	Western Greek Gamma	Etruscan C	Old Latin C (G)	Latin C
Template:Align	Phoenician gimel	Greek Gamma	Etruscan C	Old Latin	Latin C

"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. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)".

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 'File:Early Etruscan C.svg' form in Early Etruscan, then 'File:Classical Etruscan C.gif' in Classical Etruscan. In Latin, it eventually took the 'c' form in Classical Latin. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters 'c k q' were used to represent the sounds and (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, 'q' was used to represent or before a rounded vowel, 'k' before 'a', and 'c' elsewhere. During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for , and 'c' itself was 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 equivalent of Greek gamma, and 'c' as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek words, as in 'ΚΑΔΜΟΣ', 'ΚΥΡΟΣ', and 'ΦΩΚΙΣ' came into Latin as 'cadmvs', 'cyrvs' and 'phocis', respectively.

Other alphabets have letters homoglyphic to 'c' but not analogous in use and derivation, like the Cyrillic letter Es (С, с) which derives from the lunate sigma.

Later use

When the Roman alphabet was introduced into Britain, Template:Angbr represented only , and this value of the letter has been retained in loanwords to all the insular Celtic languages: in Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic, Template:Angbr represents only . The Old English Latin-based writing system was learned from the Celts, apparently of Ireland; hence, Template:Angbr in Old English also originally represented ; the Modern English words kin, break, broken, thick, and seek all come from Old English words written with Template:Angbr: , and . However, during the course of the Old English period, before front vowels ( and ) was palatalized, having changed by the tenth century to , though Template:Angbr was still used, as in . On the continent, meanwhile, a similar phonetic change before the same two vowels had also been going on in almost all modern Romance languages (for example, in Italian).Template:Clarify

In Vulgar Latin, became palatalized to in Italy and Dalmatia; in France and the Iberian Peninsula, it became . Yet for these new sounds, Template:Angbr was still used before the letters Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr. The letter thus represented two distinct values. Subsequently, the Latin phoneme (spelled Template:Angbr) de-labialized to , meaning that the various Romance languages had before front vowels. In addition, Norman used the letter Template:Angbr so that the sound could be represented by either Template:Angbr or Template:Angbr, the latter of which could represent either or depending on whether it preceded a front vowel letter or not. The convention of using both Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr 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 , and , remained unchanged, , and , were now (without any change of sound) spelled , and ; even (Template:Gloss) was subsequently changed to , and (Template:Gloss) was changed to or . The Old English Template:Angbr was also at length displaced by the French Template:Angbr so that the Old English (Template:Gloss) and (Template:Gloss) became Middle English and , respectively.

The sound , to which Old English palatalized had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly from Latin before Template:Angbr. In French, it was represented by the digraph Template:Angbr, as in (from Latin ), and this spelling was introduced into English: the Hatton Gospels, written Template:Circa, have in Matt. i-iii, , and , for the , and of the Old English version whence they were copied. In these cases, the Old English Template:Angbr gave way to Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr; on the other hand, Template:Angbr in its new value of appeared largely in French words like , and and was also substituted for Template:Angbr in a few Old English words, as , in early Middle English . By the end of the thirteenth century, both in France and England, this sound was de-affricated to ; and from that time, Template:Angbr has represented before front vowels either for etymological reasons, as in lance, cent, or to avoid the ambiguity due to the "etymological" use of Template:Angbr for , as in ace, mice, once, pence, defence.

Thus, to show etymology, English spelling has advise, devise (instead of *advize, *devize), 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 reason for using Template:Angbr. Former generations also wrote sence for sense. Hence, today, the Romance languages and English have a common feature inherited from Vulgar Latin spelling conventions where Template:Angbr takes on either a "hard" or "soft" value depending on the following letter.

Use in writing systems

Pronunciation of Template:Angbr by language

Orthography	Phonemes	Environment
Afar	Template:IPAslink
Albanian	Template:IPAslink
Cypriot Arabic	Template:IPAslink
Azeri	Template:IPAslink
Berber	Template:IPAslink
Bukawa	Template:IPAslink
Catalan	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
Template:Nwr (Pinyin)	Template:IPAslink
Crimean Tatar	Template:IPAslink
Cornish Template:Nwr	Template:IPAslink
Czech	Template:IPAslink
Danish	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y, æ, ø
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y, æ, ø
Dutch	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i in loanwords from Italian
English	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink	Before ea, ia, ie, io, iu
Esperanto	Template:IPAslink
Fijian	Template:IPAslink
Filipino	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
French	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y
Fula	Template:IPAslink
Gagauz	Template:IPAslink
Galician	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink or Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
German	Template:IPAslink	Except before ä, e, i, ö, ü, y in loanwords and names
	Template:IPAslink	Before ä, e, i, ö, ü, y in loanwords and names
Hausa	Template:IPAslink
Hungarian	Template:IPAslink
Indonesian	Template:IPAslink
Irish	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i; or after i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i; or after i
Italian	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
Khmer (ALA-LC)	Template:IPAslink
Kurmanji (Hawar)	Template:IPAslink
Latin	Template:IPAslink (and Template:IPAslink in early Latin)
Latvian	Template:IPAslink
Malay	Template:IPAslink
Manding	Template:IPAslink
Norwegian	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y, æ, ø in loanwords and names
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y, æ, ø in loanwords and names
Polish	Template:IPAslink	Except before i
	Template:IPAslink	Before i
Portuguese	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y
Romanian	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
Romansh	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
Scottish Gaelic	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i; or after i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i; or after i
Serbo-Croatian	Template:IPAslink
Slovak	Template:IPAslink
Slovene	Template:IPAslink
Somali	Template:IPAslink
Spanish	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y
	Template:IPAslink or Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y
Swedish	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i, y, ä, ö
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i, y, ä, ö
Tajik	Template:IPAslink
Tatar	Template:IPAslink
Turkish	Template:IPAslink
Valencian	Template:IPAslink	Except before e, i
	Template:IPAslink	Before e, i
Vietnamese	Template:IPAslink	Except word-finally
	Template:IPAslink	Word-finally
Welsh	Template:IPAslink
Xhosa	Template:IPAslink
Yabem	Template:IPAslink
Yup'ik	Template:IPAslink
Zulu	Template:IPAslink

English

In English orthography, Template:Angbr generally represents the "soft" value of Template:IPAc-en before the letters Template:Angbr (including the Latin-derived digraphs Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, or the corresponding ligatures Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr), Template:Angbr, and Template:Angbr, and a "hard" value of Template:IPAc-en before any other letters or at the end of a word. However, there are a number of exceptions in English: "soccer", "celt" and "sceptic" are words that have Template:IPAc-en where Template:IPAc-en would be expected. The "soft" Template:Angbr may represent the Template:IPAc-en sound in the digraph Template:Angbr when this precedes a vowel, as in the words 'delicious' and 'appreciate', and also in the word "ocean" and its derivatives.

The digraph Template:Angbr most commonly represents Template:IPAc-en, but can also represent Template:IPAc-en (mainly in words of Greek origin) or Template:IPAc-en (mainly in words of French origin). For some dialects of English, it may also represent Template:IPAc-en in words like loch, while other speakers pronounce the final sound as Template:IPAc-en. The trigraph Template:Angbr always represents Template:IPAc-en. The digraph Template:Angbr is often used to represent the sound Template:IPAc-en after short vowels, like in "wicket".

C is the twelfth most frequently used letter in the English language (after E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, and L), with a frequency of about 2.8% in words.

Other languages

In the Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese, Template:Angbr generally has a "hard" value of and a "soft" value whose pronunciation varies by language. In French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish from Latin America and some places in Spain, the soft Template:Angbr value is as it is in English. In the Spanish spoken in most of Spain, the soft Template:Angbr is a voiceless dental fricative . In Italian and Romanian, the soft Template:Angbr is .

Germanic languages usually use Template:Angbr for Romance loans or digraphs, such as Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, but the rules vary across languages. Of all the Germanic languages, only English uses the initial Template:Angbr in native Germanic words like come. Other than English, Dutch uses Template:Angbr the most, for most Romance loans and the digraph Template:Angbr. German uses Template:Angbr in the digraphs Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, and the trigraph Template:Angbr, but by itself only in unassimilated loanwords and proper names. Danish keeps soft Template:Angbr in Romance words but changes hard Template:Angbr to Template:Angbr. Swedish has the same rules for soft and hard Template:Angbr as Danish, and also uses Template:Angbr in the digraph Template:Angbr and the very common word och, "and". Norwegian, Afrikaans, and Icelandic are the most restrictive, replacing all cases of Template:Angbr with Template:Angbr or Template:Angbr, and reserving Template:Angbr for unassimilated loanwords and names.

All Balto-Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, as well as Albanian, Hungarian, Pashto, several Sami languages, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and Americanist phonetic notation (and those aboriginal languages of North America whose practical orthography derives from it), use Template:Angbr to represent , the voiceless alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant affricate. In Hanyu Pinyin, the standard romanization of Mandarin Chinese, the letter represents an aspirated version of this sound, .

Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, Template:Angbr represents a variety of sounds. Yup'ik, Indonesian, Malay, and a number of African languages such as Hausa, Fula, and Manding share the soft Italian value of . In Azeri, Crimean Tatar, Kurmanji Kurdish, and Turkish, Template:Angbr stands for the voiced counterpart of this sound, the voiced postalveolar affricate . In Yabem and similar languages, such as Bukawa, Template:Angbr stands for a glottal stop . Xhosa and Zulu use this letter to represent the click . In some other African languages, such as Berber languages, Template:Angbr is used for . In Fijian, Template:Angbr stands for a voiced dental fricative , while in Somali it has the value of .

The letter Template:Angbr is also used as a transliteration of Cyrillic Template:Angbr in the Latin forms of Serbian, Macedonian, and sometimes Ukrainian, along with the digraph Template:Angbr.

Other systems

As a phonetic symbol, lowercase Template:Angbr IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal plosive, and capital Template:Angbr is the X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal fricative.

Digraphs

There are several common digraphs with Template:Angbr, the most common being Template:Angbr, which in some languages (such as German) is far more common than Template:Angbr alone. Template:Angbr takes various values in other languages.

As in English, Template:Angbr, with the value , is often used after short vowels in other Germanic languages such as German and Swedish (other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Norwegian, use Template:Angbr instead). The digraph Template:Angbr is found in Polish and Template:Angbr in Hungarian, representing and respectively. The digraph Template:Angbr represents in Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian (where this only happens before front vowels, while otherwise it represents ). The trigraph Template:Angbr represents in German.

Other uses

• In the hexadecimal (base 16) numbering system, C is a number that corresponds to the number 12 in decimal (base 10) counting.
• In the Roman numeral system, C represents 100.
• Unit prefix c, meaning one hundredth.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

File:Porvoo.vaakuna.svg

A curled C in the coat of arms of Porvoo

• 𐤂 : Semitic letter Gimel, from which the following symbols originally derive:
  •  : Greek letter Gamma, from which C derives
    • G g : Latin letter G, which is derived from Latin C
      • Ȝ ȝ : Latin letter Ȝ, which is derived from Latin G
• Phonetic alphabet symbols related to C:
  • Template:IPA link : Small c with curl
  • ʗ : Stretched c
  • 𝼏 : Stretched c with curl – Used by Douglas Beach for a nasal click in his phonetic description of Khoekhoe.
  • 𝼝 : Small letter c with retroflex hook – Para-IPA version of the IPA retroflex tʂ.
  • ꟲ : Modifier letter capital c – Used to mark tone for the Chatino orthography in Oaxaca, Mexico; used as a generic transcription for a falling tone; also used in para-IPA notation.
• ᶜ : Modifier letter small c
• ᶝ : Modifier letter small c with curl
• ᴄ : Small capital c is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.
• Ꞔ ꞔ : C with palatal hook, used for writing Mandarin Chinese using the early draft version of pinyin romanization during the mid-1950s.

Add to C with diacritics:

• C with diacritics: Ć ć Ĉ ĉ Č č Ċ ċ Ḉ ḉ Ƈ ƈ C̈ c̈ Ȼ ȼ Ç ç Ꞔ ꞔ Ꞓ ꞓ
• Ↄ ↄ : Claudian letters

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

• © : copyright symbol
• °C : degree Celsius
• ¢ : cent
• ₡ : colón (currency)
• ₢ : Brazilian cruzeiro (currency)
• ₵ : Ghana cedi (currency)
• ₠ : European Currency Unit CE
• $\mathbb{ℂ}$ : blackboard bold C, denoting the complex numbers
• ℭ : blackletter C
• Ꜿ ꜿ : Medieval abbreviation for Latin syllables con- and com-, and Portuguese -us and -os.

Other representations

Computing

The Latin letters Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr have Unicode encodings Template:Unichar and Template:Unichar. These are the same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859. There are also precomposed character encodings for Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr with diacritics, for most of those listed above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics.

Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, voiceless palatal sounds in linguistics, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK font compatibility. The Cyrillic homoglyph of the Latin Template:Angbr has a separate encoding: Template:Unichar.

See also

• Hard and soft C
• Speed of light, c

External links

• Template:Sister-inline
• Template:Sister-inline
• Template:Sister-inline