Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/18/in-defense-of-the-hard-c.html
…
9 Likes
Irish, a language that grew out of Latin without all the other continental European linguistic mingling.
I thought I had learned something and then I thought, nah - that can’t be right, citation needed. So I Googled.
Wikipedia mentions that the Irish language gradually moved from its own alphabet to a Latin alphabet, in the main article. Not that it ‘grew out of’ Latin. Which could have been misconstrued, I suppose.
That article links to a History of Irish article that could also be misread if one was not paying attention
After the conversion to Christianity in the 5th century, Old Irish begins to appear as glosses and other marginalia in manuscripts written in Latin, beginning in the 6th century.
The main article notes
During this time, the Irish language absorbed some Latin words, some via Old Welsh, including ecclesiastical terms: examples are easpag (bishop) from episcopus, and Domhnach (Sunday, from dominica).
Not surprising that Latinate church terms would have entered the language when Christianity arrived, of course, but has little to do with whatever language Irish ‘grew out of’.
21 Likes
Yeah I think it’s more accurate to say that Latin and the Gaelic languages both evolved from the earlier European language trunk of the Indo-European languages. Gaelic isn’t Germanic, but it’s not a Romance language, either.
14 Likes
8 Likes
Yeah that’s a fair correction. I was mostly just trying to draw the connection back to the shared linguistic roots while evolving separately, but I see how my handwave-y language there actually made it worse/more confusing.
11 Likes
I think the problem with English is that it uses different modes, depending on where the words were stolen from. I’ve been learning Italian and it’s interesting how complex, yet consistent the rules are for a C in spelling:
ca,coandcuare a hard “c” soundceandciare a soft “c” sound (think “ch”)cheandchiare again a hard “c” soundkis not considered an Italian letter, and appears only in names and words left untranslated.kilobecomeschiloin Italian, butKevinis left as is.
(or something like that, I don’t have my textbook in front of me at the moment)
11 Likes
Britain has it’s own example
They were founded by an Irish priest as well, so he should have known better.
11 Likes
My brain is so broken by social media that I came to this article thinking I was going to learn about some new horrible equivalent to the hard R.
3 Likes
So many approaches to this.
Latin had three variants of /k/.
- the standard hard
crealised as /k/ in calidus, compleo, cum. - the palatalised
c, realised earlier on as /kʲ/ in ficit, cicero, and later on in cæsar, cælum, and - the velarised
c, realised as /kʷ/ and spelledqu, as in quartus, quintus, quisque.
This is a bit complicated by Latin using i for the vowel /i/ and the consonant /j/, and u for the vowel /u/, and the consonant /w/. So quis was a monosyllable with the velar /kʷis/, but cuius was bisyllabic, /ku-jus/.
qu stayed more or less as is. The central ‘hard’ c also stayed more or less as we know it.
But by the time of Caesar, the common pronunciation of palatalised c was becoming more pronounced. It was still just a variant of c, and we can see that from Classical Latin words that were borrowed into other languages, as in caesar → German Kaisar.
Hard and soft c were still both considered the same basic sound by the time of the Appendix Probi, a list of “this, not that” corrections for common mistakes in Latin in the (probably) early 4th century. Among the many corrections, there is confusion among vowels, and with assimilation, syncope, /b/ and /β/, but not between “ci-” and “si-”. Indeed, one line is “coqui non coci”, indicating that the difference between /k/ and /kʷ/ was getting a bit fast and loose. But some time after that point, the palatalised /cʲ/ began to shift to something more like /ç/ or /ʧ/, and in some languages further to /ʃ/ or /s/.
Thus French ciel /sjɛl/, Italian cielo /ʧɛ.lo/, Spanish cielo /θje.lo/ or /sjelo/, from Latin caelum: classical /kae.lum/, Medieval /ʧe:.lum/. Or “machine” from machina /ma.ki.na/. Or Caesar and Cicero in English: /si:.zə/, /si.se.roʊ/.
Irish took up Latin in the 5th Century, slowly at first, and it was always a foreign language, rather than one spoken as a first language by all or many of the population, as in Britain or much of Europe. When they started borrowing words out of Latin into Irish, the Irish language didn’t even have a phoneme /p/, so that sound either had to become voiced or was borrowed as a /q/, such as when Latin presbiter became Primitive Irish QRIMITER → Old Irish cruimther → Modern Irish cruimhthir.
It’s late now, and I’m being called to bed. If anyone’s mad interested enough, say the word and I can talk for hours on Irish linguistic history, and European historical linguistics generally. It’s my perseveration Special Interest.
17 Likes
Don’t forget the ‘cc’ which is also the ch (like focaccia, which has both the hard c, and the soft)
5 Likes
It could be fixed. 
5 Likes
As a native Italian speaker, all correct and clearly described.
My elementary teacher (R.I.P. Liliana, you are missed), taught us this rhyme, alas, more than half a century ago:
“Ca cu co, la seggiolina no, che, chi la seggiolina sì”
Literally: “Ca, cu (coo), Co, no little chair, che (ke), chi (kee) little chair yes”
Where the “seggiolina”, little chair, is clearly the (lowercase) h letter.
Same applies to the “sc” sounds:
sca scu sco always with a velar C (hard), like scam scoop, scone.
sce sci always with a soft fricative sound, like shell, ship
sche schi, again, with velar C, like skeptic, skit
Italian grammar is admittedly very complicated, but orthography is really regular with very few exceptions, so easy once you get the rules.
6 Likes
Likewise Spanish. The rules of the language are very consistent with hardly any weird exceptions, vocabulary and conjugation is the most difficult part but overall it’s straightforward. English on the other hand seems to be duct taped together with nothing but exceptions and one offs. It’s not difficult per se, but it is annoying when you think about the logic of the language
6 Likes
I guess I’m just not good at wording. Without audio to go along with all the hard C and Kaiser I only hear it the way I have always said it.
Hard C, magic E…I just go with straight memorization.
2 Likes
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse wh*re. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
– writer James Nicoll
Crudely, but accurately, put.
10 Likes
Thank you for this! My own initial reaction was bouncing between “Wow, really cool - i didn’t know that!” and “Really? Sounds kind of iffy”. You did the research, so i didn’t have to! 
.
4 Likes
I heard it said recently that English is a creole … and then it all made sense to me.
But it’s hard for native speakers of the language of Shakespeare (sort of) to admit that our language is a scruffy if lovable mongrel and not a little more purebred.
6 Likes
9 Likes
The doubled-c doesn’t actually affect the rule about whether it’s hard or soft, that’s just the way Italian indicates consonant lengthening. i.e., the pause or rhythm between syllables, and the way the syllable before the double is stressed. Wikipedia uses the example of saying the English words “ten nails,” and how you lengthen the n’s so that it doesn’t sound like the made-up word “tenails.”
You can have both a soft cc, like “focaccia,” and a hard cc, like “ecco” (e-ko) meaning here, or “cacchio” (ka-kio) which is a minced version of “dick” (“cazzo”).
Yeah, there’s basically no such thing as a spelling test in Italian and Spanish schools past about third grade. You just spell it like it sounds.
4 Likes
I have to dissagree with Mr Sarlin. I like how weird English is and would have it no other way.
4 Likes
