C and g

Question

C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" sounds? How did c come to be pronounced as s before e and i? G is the same but with a j sound. What other languages have this property? I believe French, Spanish, and Italian do. What's going on here?

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[nq:1]C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" ... a j sound. What other languages have this property? I believe French, Spanish, and Italian do. What's going on here?[/nq]
It's not a property of the language, just that there are more sounds than letters. The letters are relatives, though: a good Latin dictionary will explain under "C" and "G" the processes they drifted through.
Mike.

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[nq:2]C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" sounds?[/nq]
[nq:1]It's not a property of the language, just that there are more sounds than letters.[/nq]
Why would a shortage of letters lead someone to waste one on two sounds for which we already have the letters "k" and "s"? Or to add to "g" a sound for which we already have the letter "j"?
Stewart.

My e-mail is valid but not my primary mailbox. Please keep replies on on the 'group where everyone may benefit.

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[nq:1]C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" ... a j sound. What other languages have this property? I believe French, Spanish, and Italian do. What's going on here?[/nq]
How come 's' is sometimes pronounced like 'z'? (lies) How come 'f' is sometimes like 'v'? (of)
Why 't' like 'sh'? (motion)
Why is 'b' sometimes not pronounced? (dumb and dumber) Why does any letter sound like anything?
Clue: More relevant question might be 'Why do we use the same letter to represent different sounds?' or 'How did spelling develop into the rigid structure we know today?'

John 'ghoti' Dean
Oxford
De-frag to reply

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" ... a j sound. What other languages have this property? I believe French, Spanish, and Italian do. What's going on here?[/nq]
The process started within Latin, continued in the Romance languages, and continued further (& very messily) in English, which got its alphabet from Latin and a lot of its words from Latin & the Romance languages, especially French.
"C" in Latin originally represented (k) everywhere, but in late Latin came to be pronounced (ts) or (tS) before "E" & "I". As to what happened from then on, I suppose whole books must have been written.
Joe Fineman (Email Removed)

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[nq:1]C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" sounds? How did c come to be pronounced as s before e and i? G is the same but with a j sound.[/nq]
Sound changes in Latin. In Classical Latin, the letter represented the sound /k/, and the letter represented the sound /g/, and that was that. But as Latin evolved, the sounds of the language went through various mutations: /k/ became /tS/ before /e/ and /i/, and similarly /g/ became /dZ/ before /e/ and /i/. Since spelling changes slower than sounds, what happened was that , which had formerly represented only /k/, now was /tS/ before /e/ and /i/ and /k/ elsewhere. These days, in English, French, and some dialects of Spanish, "soft" is /s/; this is because of later sound changes within French and Spanish. In Italian and Romanian, soft is still /tS/.
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

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[nq:1]Sound changes in Latin. In Classical Latin, the letter represented the sound /k/, and the letter represented the ... this is because of later sound changes within French and Spanish. In Italian and Romanian, soft is still /tS/.[/nq]
French has done something similar with Latin "c" before "a", which is now /S/, spelled "ch".
David

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[nq:1]I do know, though, that "k" isn't a classical Latin letter, though it's related to "c",[/nq]
No, they are not related. C came from the Greek letter Î? (gamma) by way of the Etruscan alphabet. In Etruscan, the difference between (k) and (g) was not phonemic, so they used the same letter for both sounds. In Latin the difference was phonemic so they added a stroke to C, creating G. K came directly from Greek Î? (kappa) and in Latin was used only in Greek loan words.
[nq:1]Note that in French, among other languages, "j" isn't pronounced the same as "g".[/nq]
What? In French, G before E, I and Y is pronounced (Z), exactly the same as J's normal pronunciation. For example: gendarme (ZA~darm).

Dean Tiegs, NEÂ¼-20-52-25-W4
â??Confortare et esto robustusâ?
http://telusplanet.net/public/dctiegs/

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John 'ghoti' Dean
Good ***! One knew ye'd gone a bit native, eh, Deaners, but one didn't realize quite how far! I mean to say, some of the best people are abs'lute martyrs to it: the food, the gels, even the music after a while when one gets the hang of it: I mean, guinea a minute, eh? Look at Struggles O'Kelly of Hodson's. But there are still some limits, don't ye know?... Oh, I say, frightfully sorry, old man! Me dashed eyesight, y'know: thought ye'd said "dhoti", what? Can't apologize enough, my dear fellow!One of my lovable prep-school masters, Colonel X of blessed memory (who whacked one cheerfully and harmlessly on the head, crying "Ijjit!", with Kennedy's Shortbread Eating Primer* for minor infractions and solecisms, and rode to school on a Cyclemaster, thus barely saving enough money to send his boys to his old school, Clifton) told my father how shocked he had been to come across a group of Indians squatting by the roadside chatting; nothing untoward about that, except that the one who greeted him had been an Indian contemporary of his at Sandhurst; in these modern times nothing excessively untoward about that, either, except that the chap was wearing a Sandhurst blazer! I mean to say, dash it! squatting in the dust *and in the blazer! Until then, one had thought the chap was a really good friend and a jolly fine officer: it only goes to show, eh? On one's guard, I'm afraid.
Mike.

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[nq:2]Sound changes in Latin. In Classical Latin, the letter ... /i/, and similarly /g/ became /dZ/ before /e/ and /i/.[/nq]
[nq:1]French has done something similar with Latin "c" before "a", which is now /S/, spelled "ch".[/nq]
Having gone through a period of (tS) on the way. It was still (tS) when English borrowed a lot of words like "challenge", "chart", "chant"...

Come to think of it, English "candle", "chandler", and "chandelier" illustrate the three stages in the French evolution of Latin /k/ before /a/.
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

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[nq:1]C and g. What is the special thing about these letters? I mean, why do they have "hard" and "soft" ... a j sound. What other languages have this property? I believe French, Spanish, and Italian do. What's going on here?[/nq]
I could be wrong about this, but your question seems to start from the premise that written characters
should represent unique sounds as if we started with an alphabet and then made words from it.
Of course, it didn't happen that way. Alphabets came long after speech. Humans made sounds of all kinds, and the processes by which various writing systems emerged as attempts to represent those sounds by glyphs resulted in the hodgepodge we have today.
And then of course languages themselves change over time, and on top of that, the language you know as English is built on foundations of extinct languages, and includes imported words and sounds from other languages, too. That there should be any agreement at all about what glyph represents what sound is probably more worthy of wonder than that there should be differences or variances.
Michael West
Melbourne, Australia
(In the shadow of the You-Yangs)

C and g

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