C is the third letter of the alphabet used for the modern English language. It is also used in a number of other languages, including French and Spanish.
The letter C can be pronounced with an S sound, as in celery and circle, and with a K sound, as in car and camp. C is often combined with H, as in choose. See Pronunciation .
Scholars believe the letter C evolved from an Egyptian hieroglyph (pictorial symbol) that represented a throwing stick, a stick used by the ancient Egyptians to hunt birds. Hieroglyphs were adapted to be used for a Semitic language by around 1500 B.C. The alphabet for this Semitic language—the earliest known alphabet—is called Proto-Sinaitic. By 1100 B.C., an alphabet for another Semitic language, Phoenician, had evolved from Proto-Sinaitic.
The Phoenician letter that can be traced to the Egyptian stick hieroglyph is the third letter of the Phoenician alphabet, gaml. The Phoenicians used the letter to represent the beginning G sound of gaml, which was their word for stick. Around 800 B.C., when the Greeks adapted the letter, they called it gamma.
The Etruscans adopted their alphabet from that of ancient Greek around 700 B.C. Both the Greek gamma and the earlier gaml, however, had represented the sound G. Ancient Etruscan did not have a G sound, but it did have a K sound. The Etruscans used three letters to represent the K sound: kappa, qoppa, and gamma.
When the Romans adopted the alphabet from the Etruscans by about 650 B.C., they needed to write both the G and the K sound. For several centuries, they used C, the letter evolved from gamma, for both sounds. Eventually, they added a vertical stroke to C to create separate letters for the two sounds.
See also Alphabet ; G ; K ; Q ; Semitic languages .
