r/linguisticshumor • u/NebularCarina I hāpī nei au i te vānaŋa Rapa Nui (ko au he repa Hiva). • Feb 17 '25

Phonetics/Phonology Pronunciation of <c>

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323

u/NebularCarina I hāpī nei au i te vānaŋa Rapa Nui (ko au he repa Hiva). Feb 17 '25

Example languages/dialects:

  • /k/: Classical Latin
  • /s/: French
  • /tʃ/: Italian, Standard Indonesian (Malay)
  • /ts/: Polish, Czech
  • /dʒ/: Turkish
  • /tsʰ/: Standard Mandarin (Pinyin orthography)
  • /θ/: European Spanish
  • /ð/: Standard Fijian
  • /ʕ/: Somali
  • /ǀ/: Zulu, Xhosa

Honorable mentions:

  • /kʰ/: Scottish Gaelic
  • /ʑ/: Tatar
  • /ʔ/: Bukawa, Yabem

Feel free to leave any other ones in the comments!

81

u/Fast-Alternative1503 waffler Feb 18 '25

English has free variation which is kinda cursed. Honestly worse than Zulu and Xhosa. And iirc Vietnamese might do the same thing?

28

u/NonaL13 Feb 18 '25

the Zulu+Xhosa makes sense to me too, like if you're gonna insist on writing that click with a Latin letter then i feel like c is the least wrong

33

u/Fast-Alternative1503 waffler Feb 18 '25

bro I thought it was /l/ lol

9

u/NonaL13 Feb 18 '25

oh nah it's a click lol, dental click (formed by putting the tip of your tongue against your top teeth and sucking it back) (and variants on it are represented as c plus other letters), actually if you squint and totally ignore all sensible phonetics it kinda sorta sounds like a ch.

2

u/Fast-Alternative1503 waffler Feb 18 '25

The cross section of the tongue also looks like a C when pronouncing it. if you include the connection from root to lower teeth as tongue anyway.

4

u/NonaL13 Feb 18 '25

yeah honestly it's possibly the most hinged use of the letter c on this list