Letters That Don't Make Any Sense

Think about it.The letter C is often said as a K or an S. Such as in cut or cat or in center.I've often had problems with words like success because of this. I often misspell it.All it does is mimic the sound of two other consonants, so why do we need the letter C?

Thread copied here from the Letters That Don't Make Any Sense thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

How do you make represent the 'ch' sound without a 'c' or without introducing some new symbol. Neither K nor S can do the job.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

But G might. That's the sound it makes in my laguage (Dutch). It sounds like the ch in loch, for example. If you like in charity TSJ works as well. Though a bit bothersome to use, perhaps.Edited by Huntard, : edited for clarity

Hi, NoNukes.Swedish uses "kj" or "tj" for that "ch" sound. The letter "c" is still used for both soft ("s") and hard ("k") sounds.Mandarin Chinese uses "ch" in the modern romanization, but "q" represents a very similar (unaspirated) sound before soft vowels. The letter "c"---by itself---is used to represent a "ts" sound.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

We do not need the letter for any particular reason, and we certainly do not need it in the sense that you have explained (to represent /s/ or /k/). Even if we got rid of it for these purposes, we could maintain the letter in a digraph, . As others have also mentioned, there are other ways to represent the sound traditionally represented by (a voiceless alveo-palatal affricate).

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A better question would be: why do we have the letter ? If you'd like to explore that, then I'd be more than happy to input into an historical discussion on this particular letter. A cursory observation: I am unfamiliar with any other orthography that regularly employs both and , except in loanwords (which often form exceptions to many orthographic rules). A synchronic understanding might be a good place to start before delving into a diachronic discussion.

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Great topic, by the way!

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Jon

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Edited by Jon, : Edited...

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

Hi, Jon. I think most of the Germanic orthographies do. Danish/Norwegian maybe doesn't.Swedish does, though. And, both "c" and "k" can be used for hard "k" sounds before hard vowels, but diverge before soft vowels: "k" is pronounced "sh" and "c" is pronounced "s" (as written in English) before soft vowels. They also use "ck" for a hard "k" sound in some words (e.g., flicka, "girl").Mandarin Pinyin does, too.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

They do it with the Italian language such as Medici.

Thank you.

Interesting point. If were removed from its current dual role, it could easily serve for /tʃ/, thus eliminating the need for a digraph in this function (whose value is also often ambiguous).Jon

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

Okay. So it is not as unusual as I had thought. This is interesting, of course, and it adds another aspect to the understanding of its current use that may be valuable in discovering its origins.Jon

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

George Bernard Shaw invented an alphabet of some 40 characters that basically ended the whole, entire issue. These characters were carefully designed to be economical and easily identified in the text. He published some of his work in Shavian. Then some others would have to come to the fore and have the unmitigated nerve to start espousing Esperanto.- Androcles, 1.0dNote to Percy: My 56k dial-up gets MANY MANY of these:

Just to throw in a few more, West Slavonic languages usually use for /ts/ and for /k/. also stands in for /ch/ (as in 'church') with diacritics. Hungarian uses both as well, though I'm not sure exactly what sounds they represent. Whatever it is, it'll be backwards in some way, being Hungarian.

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The reason so many alphabets have odd sounds which they use very differently to others, or that are redundant, is because none of these alphabets were originally designed for the languages they're being used for. They're generally adopted from the alphabet next door, then twisted and reshaped a bit to fit a slightly different collection of sounds.

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Exactly why English has maintained this particular redundant letter I don't know, though.

yea you english people complicate mattersfor exampleyou write fish where sh could be simplefied fi (the sound that sh makes in fish is in our alphabet)or chill where the sound of ch is the letter č in our abc čillthe same goes whit shit we have for the sh soundand then we have i dunno if english produces that soundathough we have some same problems like the English language the Serbs simplified it even more they write "pii kao to govori" (write like you say it) they do not use dubble letters or any substitute letters (like your c) if it sound like a k they write it whit a k.

But then you'd be introducing a new letter to take the place of a consonant pair, where the individual parts already exist.
It's more efficient to have the two letters which can be either separate or connected, than to have 2 letters plus a third letter to represent their combination.Serbian and other Cyrillic languages pretty much all use phonetic alphabets, hence the use of things like e.g. 'ch' 'sh' 'shch' 'ts' -- CBF putting the proper Cyrillic in -- instead of just putting the corresponding letters together in a word.Those languages also lack the individual letter 'h' hence multiple letters where English just pairs up already-existing ones. Romance alphabets use letters more efficiently, hence needing fewer of them.