pronounced as /notice/In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft occurs in which represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard often precedes the non-front vowels, and, and is that of the voiceless velar stop, pronounced as //k// (as in car). The sound of a soft, typically before, and, may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English (and not coincidentally also French), the sound of soft is pronounced as //s// (as in the first and last ⟨c⟩s in "circumference").
There was no soft in classical Latin, where it was always pronounced as pronounced as //k//.[1]
This alternation is caused by a historical palatalization of pronounced as //k// which took place in Late Latin, and led to a change in the pronunciation of the sound pronounced as /[k]/ before the front vowels pronounced as /[e]/ and pronounced as /[i]/. Later, other languages not directly descended from Latin, such as English, inherited this feature as an orthographic convention.
In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard is pronounced as //k// and of soft is generally pronounced as //s//. Yod-coalescence has altered instances of pronounced as //sj// ─ particularly in unstressed syllables ─ to pronounced as //ʃ// in most varieties of English, affecting words such as ocean, logician and magician. Generally, the soft pronunciation occurs before ; it also occurs before and in a number of Greek and Latin loanwords (such as coelacanth, caecum, caesar). The hard pronunciation occurs everywhere else except in the letter combinations,, and which have distinct pronunciation rules. generally represents pronounced as //ks// before, as in accident, succeed, and coccyx.
There are exceptions to the general rules of hard and soft :
A silent can occur after at the end of a word or component root word part of a larger word. The can serve a marking function indicating that the preceding is soft, as in dance and enhancement. The silent often additionally indicates that the vowel before is a long vowel, as in rice, mace, and pacesetter.
When adding suffixes with (such as -ed, -ing, -er, -est, -ism, -ist, -y, and -ie) to root words ending in, the final of the root word is often dropped and the root word retains the soft pronunciation as in danced, dancing, and dancer from dance. The suffixes -ify and -ise/-ize can be added to most nouns and adjectives to form new verbs. The pronunciation of in newly coined words using these suffixes is not always clear. The digraph may be used to retain the hard pronunciation in inflections and derivatives of a word such as trafficking from the verb traffic.
There are several cases in English in which hard and soft alternate with the addition of suffixes as in critic/criticism and electric/electricity (electrician has a soft pronunciation of pronounced as //ʃ// because of yod-coalescence).
A number of two-letter combinations or digraphs follow distinct pronunciation patterns and do not follow the hard/soft distinction of . For example, may represent pronounced as //tʃ// (as in chicken), pronounced as //ʃ// (as in chef), or pronounced as //k// (as in choir). Other letter combinations that don't follow the paradigm include,,,,, and . These come primarily from loanwords.
Besides a few examples (recce, soccer, Speccy), fits neatly with the regular rules of : Before, the second is soft while the first is hard. Words such as accept and success are pronounced with pronounced as //ks// and words such as succumb and accommodate are pronounced with pronounced as //k//. Exceptions include loanwords from Italian such as cappuccino with pronounced as //tʃ// for .
Many placenames and other proper nouns with -cester (from Old English ceaster, meaning Roman station or walled town) are pronounced with pronounced as //stər// such as Worcester (pronounced as //ˈwʊstər//), Gloucester (pronounced as //ˈɡlɒstər// or pronounced as //ˈɡlɔːstər//), and Leicester (pronounced as //ˈlɛstər//). The pronounced as //s// pronunciation occurs as a combination of a historically soft pronunciation and historical elision of the first vowel of the suffix.
The original spellings and pronunciations of Italian loanwords have mostly been kept. Many English words that have been borrowed from Italian follow a distinct set of pronunciation rules corresponding to those in Italian. The Italian soft pronunciation is pronounced as //tʃ// (as in cello and ciao), while the hard is the same as in English. Italian orthography uses to indicate a hard pronunciation before or, analogous to English using (as in kill and keep) and (as in mosquito and queue).
In addition to hard and soft, the digraph represents pronounced as //ʃ// or, if between vowels, pronounced as //ʃʃ// when followed by or (as in scena or sciarpa with pronounced as //ʃ//, crescendo and fascia with pronounced as //ʃʃ//). Meanwhile, in Italian always represents pronounced as //sk//, not pronounced as //ʃ//, but English-speakers commonly pronounce it as pronounced as //ʃ//, perhaps in part due to familiarity with the German pronunciation; thus bruschetta often is realized not with the pronounced as //k// of Italian pronounced as //brusˈketta//, but with pronounced as //ʃ//. Italian uses to indicate the geminate pronounced as //kk// before,, or pronounced as //ttʃ// before or . English does not have geminate phonemes, thus loanwords with soft that are pronounced with pronounced as //ttʃ// in Italian, such as cappuccino, are normally pronounced in English with the geminate simplified: pronounced as //ˌkæpəˈtʃinoʊ//.
Rarely, the use of unusual suffixed forms to create neologisms occurs. For example, the words ace and race are both standard words but adding -ate or -age (both productive affixes in English) would create spellings that seem to indicate hard pronunciations. (and racage). Potential remedies include altering the spelling to and rasage, though no standard conventions exist.
Sometimes replaces,, or, as a trope for giving words a hard-edged or whimsical feel. Examples include the Mortal Kombat franchise and product names such as Kool-Aid and Nesquik. More intensely, this use of has also been used to give extremist or racist connotations. Examples include Amerika or Amerikkka (where the is reminiscent of German and the totalitarian Nazi regime and the racist Ku Klux Klan, respectively).[2] [3]
Most modern Romance languages make the hard/soft distinction with,[4] The soft pronunciation, which occurs before, and, is:
The hard occurs in all other positions and represents pronounced as //k// in all these aforementioned languages, including in the case of ⟨c⟩ that comes before the Romanian letter î, which is different from i.
In Italian[6]
In the orthographies of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, most consonants including have a "broad" (velarized) vs "slender" distinction (palatalized) for many of its other consonants generally based on whether the nearest vowel is or, respectively. In Irish, ⟨c⟩ usually represents a hard pronounced as //k//, but represents pronounced as //c// before e or i, or after i. In Scottish Gaelic, broad is one of /kʰ ʰk ʰk k/, and slender is one of /kʰʲ ʰkʲ ʰkʲ kʲ/, depending on the phonetic environment.
A number of orthographies do not make a hard/soft distinction. The is always hard in Welsh but is always soft in Slavic languages, Hungarian, and in Hanyu Pinyin transcription system of Mandarin Chinese, where it represents pronounced as //tsʰ// and in Indonesian and many of the transcriptions of the languages of India such as Sanskrit and Hindi, where it always represents pronounced as //tʃ//. See also C § Other languages.
Swedish has a similar phenomenon with hard and soft : this results from a similar historical palatalization development. Soft is typically a palatal pronounced as /[ç]/ or an alveolo-palatal pronounced as /[ɕ]/, and occurs before not only, and, but also,, and . Another similar system with hard and soft is found in Faroese with the hard being pronounced as //kʰ// and the soft being pronounced as //t͡ʃʰ//, and Turkish where the soft is pronounced as //c//.
The Vietnamese alphabet, while based on European orthographies, does not have a hard or a soft per se. The letter, outside of the digraph, always represents a hard /k/ sound. However, it never occurs in "soft positions", i.e. before, where is used instead, while never occurs elsewhere except in the digraph and a few loanwords. Quite ironically, the names of the letters "c" and "k" are borrowed from Europe and those letters don't even occur in their own letter names (C: xê and K: ca.) Hồ Chí Minh had proposed a simplified spelling, as shown in the title of one of his books, 'Đường kách mệnh'.
Old Bohemian had hard c, but it was pronounced [x], as in Schecowitz, Tocowitz, and Crudim.
