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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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!

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u/Zegreides Feb 18 '25

In Colonial Quechua, <c> could stand any of the following phonemes: /k kʼ kʰ q qʼ qʰ s̪/. The phoneme /s̪/ was written <c> before front vowels and <ç> before back vowels, but some printed texts have no cedilla, resulting in misspellings such as <cumac> /s̪ʊmaq/. One book introduced the letter <c̄> to transcribe /q qʼ qʰ/ as opposed to /k kʼ kʰ/, but it looks like this proposal never caught on.