Caldvs wrote:Gratias Omne!
Im still confused as to where the S sound of C's come from that we have in the European languages.. C's were pronounced like K in the Germanic tounges as well, hence we have Kaiser and King and Knight(originally pronounced K-night). So if C's were pro. like K in both languages,where did we get the S sound of them in SOME of the Germanic and Romance Languages of today?I heard that we that speak English get the s sound of c's from French,thats understandable but were did they get it since BOTH Latin and Germanic languages pronounced it like a K?
And if Im not mistaken the Celts pronounced it like a k also..thats why the words Cornish,Celt and MacDonald are Kornish,Kelt,and MakDonald today and not Sornish,Selt, and MasDonald.
The Latin letter 'c' being pronounced as an 's' in front of 'i' or 'e' came about through a process called palatisation. In producing the 'k' sound the tip of the tongue rests either behind the top teeth or just behind on the alveolar ridge. To produce the 'i' and 'e' sound the tongue is a little further back in the mouth, so with the 'i' or 'e' also being uttered after the 'k' sound there is often a certain amount of slurring the sound as the tongue rapidly moves back from the 'k' position to the 'i' or 'e' position. Over time this produces a change in sound written as /Ç/ in the Interanational Phonetic Alphabet (that is the 'ch' sound in the German word 'ich'). Over even more time this sound in northern France changed by moving further the tongue further back in the mouth to produce the 's' sound. This is how modern French (and consequently English) have this 's' sound for 'c' before 'i' and 'e'.
A similar process happened in Latin with 't' or 'd' followed by 'i' or 'e'. That's how we get a 's' sound in French on words ending in '-tion' (and consequently the 'sh' sound in English in the same words) and where the Italian 'dz' sound for their letter 'z' comes from. It's a process that's happening with modern English too (in England at any rate) - the pronunciation of the 't' in the word Tuesday is often pronounced as a 'ch' sound, so we say "Choosday" (although there is no 'i' in the spelling, there is an 'i' sound after the 't').