

|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
C (lowercase c) is the third letter of the Roman alphabet. Its name in English is cee.
In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek Γ (Gamma) was used to represent /k/. In the beginning, the Romans used C for both /k/ and /g/, only later adding a horizontal bar at right-center to produce G. It is possible but uncertain that C represented only /g/ at an even earlier time, while K might have been used for /k/.
Some scholars claim that the Semitic ג (gîmel) pictured a camel, but most assume it was probably gaml (a throwing stick/boomerang).
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" from its resemblance to a crescent moon.
Contents |
/k/ developed palatal and velar allophones in Latin, probably due to Etruscan influence. 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 English and French, C takes the "hard" value /k/ finally and before A, O, and U, and the "soft" value /s/ before E, I, or Y. Romance languages obey similar rules, but the soft value is different in several languages, taking on /θ/ in European Castilian and /ʧ/ (like English CH) in Italian and Romanian.
Other languages use C with different values, such as /k/ regardless of position in Irish, Welsh, /θ/ in Fijian, /ʤ/ in Turkish, Tatar, Azeri, /ʧ/ in Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, /ʦ/ in Czech, Croatian, Esperanto, Hungarian, Polish, Romanized Chinese, Serbian.
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 takes the value /ʧ/, but can take the value /k/ or /x/, usually when transliterating Greek Χ or Hebrew. CH takes various values in other languages, such as /ç/, /k/, or /x/ in German, /ʃ/ in French, /k/ in Italian, /ʈʂʰ/ in Mandarin Chinese, and so forth. CK, with the value /k/, 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 /ʧ/.
As a phonetic symbol, lowercase c is the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal plosive, and capital C is the X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal fricative.
Charlie represents the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
In international Morse code the letter C is DahDitDahDit: - · - ·
In Braille the letter C is represented as ⠉ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,
XX .. ..
(Unicode U+2102 "ℂ") denotes the set of all complex numbers.
(Unicode U+212D "ℭ") denotes the first beth number: the cardinality of the set of real numbers (the "continuum"), or of the power set of natural numbers.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||