A, B,...C?

The third letter of the alphabet

Having shown how the first letter A originally depicted an ox head (alef) and the second letter B a house (bet), we come to the third sign of the Latin alphabet to find it mired in controversy. The pronunciation of c in English - as a hard c in camel, as a soft c in cinder, as a ch in cello, as a sh in ocean - led to some disputatious pamphlets as early as the 16th century, with grammarians claiming that the letter was inconsistent and redundant. In 1762 Benjamin Franklin proposed abolishing C along with J, W, and Y.

The Greek alphabetic letter from which C derives is gamma, a hard g, standardly written Γ (which is conveniently the image of a gallows). The Greeks found it in the Phoenician alphabet, where it was called gimel and looked like a bent line, originally facing the other way from Γ and more sharply angled, i.e.

Greeks settlers in Italy in the seventh century BC passed it to the Etruscans, who had no hard g sound in their language, so they used it as equivalent to the sound of K (a letter they preserved, but which was not much used in their alphabet or in Latin). The Etruscans smoothed down the angular shape into a left-facing semicircle; the Romans flipped it to make the letter we recognise as C.

What was the origin of that gimel? For a long time it as assumed that it was related to the Phoenician word for ‘camel’, and that the original shape represented either a camel’s hump or the shape of its head and neck. The word for ‘camel’, though similar, is not identical; a more plausible etymology is the Semitic word gaml(a) meaning a throwing-stick, which appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs as

Throwing-sticks were used in hunting and killing birds (see image below from Egypt around 1400 BC), similar to boomerangs in Australia.

This is the first of a number of manufactured tools that will be found to have been represented by the letters of the alphabet, others being the comb and the fish-hook. The throwing-stick was perhaps even more central to ancient people’s lives than was the camel. It will come back again (sorry!) when we consider the letter G.