C (idea)

C Through Space and Time

The letter C is one strange duck. Historically, its precursor first popped up in the Phoenician alphabet, where it was used to represent the sound 'G'. This was then ported over to Greek, becoming the third letter in the Greek alphabet: alpha α, beta β, gamma γ, delta δ.

So far, so good... but then the Romans messed up. Initially, they used gamma for both the 'G' and 'K' sounds, but this was too confusing so they decided to split it up. Henceforth the letter C would always be read 'K', and a C with a little hook added to it -- today known as G -- would be read 'G'. Simple enough, although people ignorant of the finer points of Latin orthography still insist on ordering their Caesar salads as see-zer salads, instead of the original keh-sar. O tempora, o mores!

Then came the Dark Ages, and Latin was fragmented into dozens of dialects. In many, a phenomenon called palatalization took place before soft vowels, shifting the 'K' sound roughly like this:

1. 'K'
2. 'KY'
3. 'CH' (present-day Romanian, Italian)
   • 'SH' (French)
4. 'TS' (German)
5. 'S' (French, Portuguese)
6. 'TH' (Castilian Spanish)

Different orthographies were then developed to deal with the mess. The French came up with the curlicue known as the cedilla Ç to flag soft C's in some vowel combinations. Italian decided to default to the soft 'CH', so c'è is pronounced "che", but harden it if followed by a hard vowel or the letter H, so che is pronounced "ke". English, typically, imported its vocabulary left and right without doing anything about the orthography, and was left with the unholy mess poked at in tem42's writeup.

Fortunately, most languages using Latin letters but without the historical baggage of Romance roots decided that this was ridiculous, and either standardized the letter to mean one sound only, or dropped it entirely. Unfortunately, standards are wonderful since there are so many to choose from, so here's a partial list of possible English readings and the languages they are used in, with a few additional notes on what various squigglies added to the letter do.

1. 'CH'
   • Hausa
   • Malay/Bahasa Indonesia
   • Maltese
     • Strictly speaking, there is no plain C in Maltese, just a C with a dot like this: Ċ
   • Volapük
2. 'J'
   • Turkic languages (Azeri, Kurdish, Turkish)
     • In Turkic languages, Ç is not 'S' but 'CH'
3. 'K'
   • Celtic languages (Cornish, Gaelic, Manx, Welsh)
   • Vietnamese
4. 'S'
   • Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Bulgarian etc)
     • This is not the letter C at all, but the Cyrillic glyph С, which developed from Greek sigma Σ, not gamma. But your average Cold War-era Westerner will still read "СССР" as "see-see-see-pee", so for the record, it's "es-es-es-ar".
5. 'SH'
   • Lojban
6. 'TH'
   • Fijian
     • Pronounced voiced (IPA ð), as in "this"
7. 'TS'
   • Esperanto
   • Finno-Ugric languages (Estonian, Hungarian) except Finnish
   • Mandarin (pinyin)
   • Slavic languages (Albarian, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovene, etc)
     • Most Slavic languages follow the convention that a C with a hacek (č) is pronounced 'CH'

   ...and two sounds completely absent from English:

8. dental click
   • Zulu/Xhosa

9. voiceless pharyngeal fricative
   • Somali
     • This sound is written ' (open quote) in most flavors of romanized Arabic and Hebrew, and the even stranger Ħ in Maltese. The easiest approximation in English is to just leave it out entirely!

Many orthographies based on English or Spanish, such as Swahili, Quechua and even Hepburn Japanese, use the letter C only in the combination CH, which is read as an English 'CH' sound. There are also a large number of languages where the letter C is used for loanwords only (eg. Finnish, Tagalog, Icelandic), which means that C can (theoretically) use any of the readings above.

References

www.omniglot.org
Gritchka the cunning linguist