954: Pronunciations of C (cinematography) Jul 20, 2017

In English orthography, the letter C can represent the sound /k/ as in 'character' and 'car' but can also represent /s/ as in 'charade', 'Caesar', 'cemetery', or 'cinematograph'. The reason for this is that English spelling is just as much of a blend of conventions from other languages as is the make-up of its vocabulary. In the case of 'Caesar', which is taken directly from Latin as a family-name, the C was originally pronounced /k/ just like the German 'Kaiser'. There will be more on that later. In the case of 'cemetery' and 'cinematograph', the words are originally of Greek origin, a language for which people use a different alphabet. When transcribing Greek now for English-speakers, people will use the letter K, but in the orthography for Latin and French, the languages through which English obtained 'cemetery' and 'cinematograph' respectively, there is no K, so people used C, and over time began to pronounce the C as /s/. The origin of 'cinema' is from the Greek participle 'kinema' meaning 'movement', so the C it has now is not completely arbitrary, historically and etymologically speaking.