Talk:Hard and soft C/Archive 1

Muscle
The c in muscle was originally hard. The word is derived from latin musculus. The /k/ sound disappeard by the phenomenon of elision. In the deriviative muscular, the /k/ is retained. Andreas (T) 20:19, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the beneficial note on this, Andreas. Your modest "elision" of my recent additions thus makes sense :)  Maybe even a tidbit about this elision phenomenon with muscle (and maybe corpuscle?) can be added to the article, too.  —Regards, Catdude 07:27, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for adding the tidbit :) —Catdude 02:15, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

"Suffixation of neologisms"
What is this section? It's written like a newscast or lecture, with personal pronouns and rhetorical questions. It's interesting enough, but needs to be cleaned up if it is necessary at all to have this talky section in the article. ALTON  .ıl  04:46, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Italian Loanwords Section
I think the section would be more readable and make more sense if, instead of listing a series of "exceptions" and then explaining at the end that all the exceptions actually follow a set of rules (which would mean they are not exceptions), the section explained that various Italian loanwords follow Italian pronunciation rules. Ventifact (talk) 01:43, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

So I'll go do that now. Ventifact (talk) 00:25, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Alrighty then. I have rewritten the section. Here are some comments on my edits. Note that items 5-7 are style considerations that I would suggest would improve the rest of the article. I will not be able to carry out those changes personally, but for anyone considering a major edit of the whole article I would suggest considering these comments.
 * 1. In words like "special" the "sh" sound results from Yod-coalescence, not because the "i" is a marker letter.
 * 2. I think Yod-coalescence in which becomes  does not belong in the same section as Italian loanwords.  I have broken the previous content into two sections, one on coalescence and one on Italian loanwords.
 * 3. By breaking Italian loanwords away from Yod-coalescence, I was able to take the logical step of including rules for hard "c" proncunciation of Italian imports as well. This article is on both hard and soft, after all.
 * 4. Double consonants in Italian loanwords indicate a pronunciation, gemination, that English does not have. The two letters do not make separate sounds any more than the letters in "ch" are separate in English.  Another example along these lines would be "rr" in Spanish, which is also not two "r"s but a distinct letter with a unique pronunciation.  That is why Anglicized Italian words with double-c do not sound each "c" separately.  The previous version recognized this but I have attempted to treat the topic more clearly in the article.
 * 5. I removed internal links to example words. I don't think it's going to help most readers to be able to quickly access the ocean article when they're trying to find out about pronunciation of the letter "c".  Even among non-native and low-level readers the meaning of a simple word like "ocean" will be clear, and if it's not I do not think they are likely to get much out of this article.  The gratuitous link, and any implication the reader derives that following it will elucidate the topic of hard/soft "c", seems distracting.
 * 6. I cleared out the conversationality of the writing. I have noticed that additional text of the article appears to have been similarly written.  It appears to follow a sort of informal pedagogic style (a la a lecture or essay).  I don't think this is the preferred style for Wpedia.  Among other problems this style has, it assumes encyclopedia users will read linearly through an article from top to bottom.  Within practical limits, individual sections should be self-contained for readers seeking specific information.
 * 7. I removed parentheses (round brackets) and slashes from around IPA symbols, using only square brackets to set them off. This follows usage IN most of Wpedia, including the IPA article and many other linguistic articles.

Ooops. Forgot to sign. I am Ventifact. Ventifact (talk) 04:35, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Major cleanup
I just did a major cleanup of the article, though it still has a pretty strong English-language bias, despite the phenomenon having its root in European languages. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 07:01, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

List of English words where C is pronounced exceptionally
I have added a page with the above title that gives an explicit list of all the exceptions to the rule stated in paragraph 1 of "Hard and soft C". Is this a useful contribution to Wikipedia? I ask because an annoying fellow named Aeusoes1 thinks that it is not, and has started repeatedly removing it. He asked that I start a discussion here, and so here I am.

Thanks

Jonathanrcoxhead (talk) 21:24, 17 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The main problem here is that there are two articles that cover the same topic, with one article (this one) doing a more thorough job of it. As it stands, there are so few examples listed at LEWCPE that those that aren't already explicitely mentioned here-namely ASCII, loci (though this is not always pronounced with a hard c), CMOS, corpuscle, muscle, Tucson, and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-- and those that aren't implicitely accounted for here--namely supercalifragilisticexpialidocious--that we can easily add them if we so choose.  There's also a problem with the title.  Letters are not "pronounced"  They represent pronunciations.
 * Jonathanrcoxhead and I have discussed this a bit on my talk page, though we don't seem to come to any agreement. So if other editors could weigh in on this, it would be helpful.  There is also a parallel conversation at Talk:Hard and soft G. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  22:44, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I come via WP:3O. To me, it seems the list articles are inappropriate as they are rather dictionary-like and Wikipedia is not a dictionary. I think merging them into the existing articles is a good solution. --Cyber cobra (talk) 23:50, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

C and ch, c and k, c and qu
Originally I changed However, Italian orthography differs from English in using ‹ch› to represent a hard pronunciation before ‹e› or ‹i›. to Italian orthography uses ‹ch› to indicate a hard pronunciation before ‹e› or ‹i›, analogous to English use of ‹k› which occurs only in loanwords in Italian and Spanish, Portuguese and French use of ‹qu› which is pronounced in Italian.

But I was--I suspect--misunderstood and the last part was changed to somewhat analogous to English use of ‹qu› in loanwords from Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Which isn't what I meant. I meant Italian uses  where Spanish, French (usually), and Portuguese use  and where English uses . So I changed it to the less ambiguous Italian orthography uses ‹ch› before ‹e› or ‹i› for, analogous to English using ‹k› before ‹e› or ‹i› as in kill and kiss. And this is accurate, because yes English has kangaroo and quesadilla but Italian has kaputt, kilo-, kiwi, Kenia, kitsch, and kebab.99.152.42.211 (talk) 22:30, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Ahh, I didn't know that  could also be used in Italian to represent before front vowels.  Okay, well then "analogous" doesn't need to be qualified with "somewhat."  Perhaps we should word it as "Italian orthography uses ‹ch› to represent  before ‹e› or ‹i›, analogous to English using ‹k› (as in kill or keep) and ‹qu› (as in quiche, mosquito, or quesadilla)." — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  23:16, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * That's fine but I'm not satisfied with the equivalency of  in Italian and  in English. Italian also uses quiche and I imagine quesadilla would be used if Italians ate it. Mosquito is a good example and so is queue (as would be pronounced /s(j)u/ as it is in pharmaceutical). Conquer, antiquing, and torquing are also examples. Conquistador might be a good example but the  may be pronounced in English and Italian has the same loanword. 99.55.158.46 (talk) 04:08, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
 * (My IP has changed, I'm the same user as 99.152.42.211.)99.55.158.46 (talk) 04:11, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Exception to the rule
Words like 'chef,' in which the c is followed by an h and pronounced [ʃ] would seem to be an exception to the rule stated in the article. Joshua Crowgey 11:17, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Loanwords are bound to be exceptional. ;) --Kjoonlee 20:40, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I have made a couple of revisions to this section: "Celt" etc. is not a word derived FROM the Celtic languages; it is ABOUT them. The word itself probably came from French into English. And for both "Celt" and "flaccid", we cannot say "is pronounced..."; there are still dictionaries which list the alternate pronunciations for these words, and, in the case of "Celtic", still educated native speakers such as myself who pronounce the traditional way with a soft c. When we older people die off, you can change "obsolescent" to "obsolete" and give it even less weight. - Also, just in general, it wouldn't hurt to give a REASON for some of these exceptions. For "Celtic", it is probably due to confusion with the word "Keltic"; for most of the other words, the k-sound is spelled with "c" at the end of a word or syllable (e.g. "panic"), but when another morpheme, such as "-ing" is added, the "c" is often respelled as "ck" (panicking) in order to preserve the hard/soft rule. The basic problem is that the rule applies with the addition of Latinate morphemes, thus "electric" but "electricity" -- the -ing ending, however, is an Old English morpheme, not Latinate: the hard/soft rules don't apply, but most people don't think about the origins of words or morphemes when they spell, thus "panicking" with the "ck". Footnote: instead of following even these simple rules, some English speakers (writers) seem to prefer keeping the same visual appearance of a morpheme, even if not necessary, thus "aging" is also spelled "ageing". However, as is the case in such random mutations, there is no rime or reason to it: a Google search shows that "aging" is 5 times as frequent as "ageing", but "raging", which SHOULD be equivalent, is 40 times as frequent as "rageing". Jakob37 (talk) 00:35, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I was under the impression that someone was claiming that celtic loanwords retain a hard c pronunciation. This is true of Scottish Gaelic ceilidh.  Celtic itself ultimately derives from the autonome of a celtic tribe, but it came into English with a soft pronunciation.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  02:11, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Non-European languages
Per this edit summary, isn't excluding non-European languages a POV issue? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 11:34, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * When the lead refers specifically to European languages, I don't see that it violates NPOV to discuss only European languages. And anyway, the use of ‹c› in Pinyin really isn't relevant to the topic of "hard and soft C", since it has only one value there. —Angr (talk) 13:01, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * That would mean that the lede itself has POV issues, right? The article also mentions some languages (like Polish) that have only one value for ‹c›. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  23:11, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, are there any non-European languages that use the Latin alphabet and distinguish hard and soft c? This article isn't "Values of the letter ‹c› around the world". It would make more sense to take out the discussion of Slavic and Celtic languages than to drift away from the topic at hand. —Angr (talk) 09:52, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

"Use of ⟨k⟩" section

 * "Sometimes ⟨k⟩ replaces ⟨c⟩, ⟨ck⟩, or ⟨qu⟩ in product names (e.g. Kool-Aid, Nesquik). Similarly, the hard ⟨c⟩ is frequently replaced by a ⟨k⟩, as in the Mortal Kombat franchise."

Does the second sentence actually say anything that the first sentence does not? M-1 (talk) 03:06, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Doesn't look like it. Are there any examples of sensational spelling using c where the standard orthography uses k? The closest I can think of is something like Banc of America Securities, though that could just be an affected use of the French spelling. Angr (talk) 11:01, 4 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Not that I can think of. (I think the "banc" spelling is used by organizations (holding companies, subsidiaries, etc.) that, in themselves, don't perform all the functions of a bank, so they can't legally call themselves one.) M-1 (talk) 21:10, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

The terms "hard" and "soft"
There is a concern at Talk:Hard and soft G about the appropriateness of the terms "hard" and "soft", which would apply mutatis mutandis to this article. I would suggest the same approach adopted there be used here also. Quīsquīlliān (  talk  ) 20:42, 14 September 2020 (UTC)