THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH PODCAST

TRANSCRIPTS

EPISODE 5:
CENTUM, SATEM AND THE LETTER C

Presented by Kevin W. Stroud

©2012-2021 Seven Springs Enterprises, LLC

Welcome to the History of English Podcast – a podcast about the history of the English language
and the people who contributed to that history. In the last episode, we looked at how Jacob
Grimm and other early linguists discovered a very specific set of rules to identify the way in
which ancient Indo-European words became Germanic words. That included a set of specific
sound changes which also permit linguists to reconstruct large portions of the original ancient
Indo-European language.

In this episode, I want to focus on one specific set of sound changes which early linguists used to
classify the Indo-European languages. And I then want to digress a bit and explore this concept
of sound changes a little bit further. As you will see, some of the very same sound shifts that
were identified within the original Indo-European language are still reflected in certain aspects of
Modern English. And specifically, we can see this same type of sound shift in the modern
English letter C which is used to identify both the ‘k’ sound and the ‘s’ sound. Have you ever
wondered why we have a letter C at all? Why not just a K or an S? I will answer that question in
this episode. This is the story of the Centum vs the Satem languages and the history of the letter
C.

The letter C is one of the more challenging aspects of English for small children learning to read
and write English - and for that matter some adult speakers of other languages who are trying to
learn English. One of the first English words that children learn to spell is cat. And very early
on, they associate the letter C with the ‘k’ sound. And they continue that association as they
learn words like car, cry, cup, cow and many, many other words. But they also learn words like
city and face. And especially if they are girls, they learn to love Cinderella. So they also learn to
associate the letter C with the ‘s’ sound. And some words like circle and circus have two Cs –
one that represents the ‘s’ sound and one that represents the ‘k’ sound.

So sometimes children ask what may seem like a pretty logical question, “Why do we even have
a letter C? Why not just use a letter K or a letter S?” Well, if we were inventing the English
language today – or at least if we were inventing the alphabet today – that may make sense. But
of course, we’re dealing with a language that has been around a long time. And an alphabet that
has been around even longer. So sometimes we’re stuck with these peculiar rules which are tied
to the history of the language and the history of the alphabet.

One quick note before I go any further into this story. As I have noted before, this is ultimately a
history podcast – not a podcast about the proper use of English or a podcast about linguistics. But
in this episode, I am going to talk about one particular aspect of linguistics – a specific sound
change called ‘assibilation.’ I generally try to avoid technical issues related to linguistics, but I
am going to be discussing that particular linguistic concept here. I will try to do it a way that it
doesn’t begin to sound like a course on linguistics. And if you stick with me through this
episode, I think you will discover a lot about Modern English and specifically the reason why
certain words in English are spelled and pronounced the way they are.

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The story begins where we left off in the last episode. With the comparison of Indo-European
languages and the attempt to reconstruct the original Indo-European language. Very early on,
linguists noted a trend. And the trend concerned the word for hundred. You may recall from the
last episode that the Indo-European word for hundred was reconstructed as *k’mtom from
cognates found in eight different branches if the Indo-European family tree.

After the original Indo-European word for hundred was reconstructed, linguists then looked at
the next stage in the evolution of the word, which was the earliest versions of the word in the
separate Indo-European languages. In other words, they looked at the earliest version of the word
in Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, etc. And at this point, they noticed a very distinct split. The word had
changed very early on such that there was a general split in the way the first consonant was
pronounced. Some of the languages used a hard ‘k’ as the first consonant of the word just like
the original Indo-European word. But other languages used an ‘s’ sound for the first consonant.
This distinction is best represented by two of the oldest Indo-European languages we have for
reference. In Latin, the word for hundred was centum – spelled C-E-N-T-U-M. Keep in mind
that the C was always pronounced as a ‘k’ in Latin. In Sanskrit, the word was satem – spelled S-
A-T-E-M.

So these early linguists looked at the various words for hundred across all the Indo-European
languages. And they noted that all of the Indo-European languages in which the word for
hundred began with an ‘s’ – like satem in Sanskrit – were located in the eastern part of the Indo-
European-speaking world. This included Eastern European languages like Baltic and Slavic,
Armenian, and Albanian, as well as the Indo-Iranian languages in Asia like Persian and Sanskit.

These early linguists then looked at all of the Indo-European languages in which the word for
hundred began with a ‘k’ sound – like centum in Latin. And not surprisingly, all of those
languages were spoken in the west. These included Latin (obviously), Greek, Celtic and the
Germanic languages. In other words, the languages of Central and Western Europe.

Now if you are saying, “Hey wait, the English word hundred begins with an ‘h’ sound, not a ‘k’
sound,” remember back to the last podcast episode when we talked about Grimm’s law. This was
actually one of the examples I gave to illustrate a specific sound shift which Grimm observed.
There was a later shift from the ‘k’ sound to the ‘h’ sound in the Germanic languages. So the
Germanic languages are actually classified as Centum languages because very early on there was
a ‘k’ pronunciation, but the ‘k’ shifted to an ‘h’ at the beginning of the Germanic period.

So let’s stop and consider all of this for a moment. To the east, all of the Indo-European
languages have certain words – like the word for hundred – that begin with an ‘s’ sound. And to
the west, all of the Indo-European languages have those words – like the word for hundred – but
there they consistently begin with a ‘k’ sound like the original Indo-European word did.

Based upon this division, linguists concluded that there must have been a very early split among
the original Indo-Europeans. Soon after this initial split or division occurred, one group evolved a
sound shift in which the original ‘k’ sound in certain words – like the word for ‘hundred’ –
became an ‘s’ sound. This process is called ‘assibilation’ by linguists. It is also sometimes called

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‘palatalization.’ Now this is not a podcast about linguistics. But let’s explore the technical
aspects of this for a second.

‘Assibilation’ basically refers to a shift from one sound to a sibilant, which is a hissing or
hushing sound like /s/, /z/, /j/, /ch/, or /sh/. This actually happens quite often as we will see. One
quick example in English is the word ‘assibilation’ itself, or for that matter, most words that end
in ‘T-I-O-N,’ but are pronounced /shun/ like ‘revolution’ or ‘abolition.’ Most of these words
come from Latin where the ending was originally ‘T-I-O’ and was pronounced /tee-o/. But as
these words found their into French and eventually to English, they assibilated to the ‘shun’
pronunciation we have today. And that is what linguists concluded must have happened when
this initial division of Indo-European speakers occurred. They also concluded that since this
division broke down very clearly from a geographic perspective with the ‘S’-speaking Satem
languages in the East and ‘K’-speaking Centum languages in the west, then we must be looking
at a general migration pattern which occurred very early on. The Satem speakers must have
separated from the original Indo-European speakers and traveled eastward carrying their Satem
dialect with them.

This theory was later put to the test in the early twentieth century when the Hittite language in
modern-day Turkey was identified as an Indo-European language and the Tocharian language in
northwestern China was discovered. Based on some very technical aspects of the Hittite
language in ancient Turkey, which dates all the way back to the Old Testament of the Bible, it
was concluded that Hittite did not really fit neatly into either the Centum or the Satem group.
Generally today it is placed with the Centum group, but the modern view is that the first speakers
of the ancient Anatolian languages, which included Hittite, probably broke away from the
original Indo-Europeans before the Centum-Satem split occurred. So these ancient ancestors of
the Hittites in Turkey broke away first, and then sometime later the early ancestors of the Satem-
speakers broke away and began their migrations. And there is other evidence to support this
theory. As we will see, Hittite is considered the oldest attested Indo-European language.

The other discovery – the Tocharian language in northwestern China – also posed some questions
because it was by far the easternmost discovered Indo-European language, being located in China
itself, but it was not a Satem language like all the other eastern Indo-European languages. It was
a Centum language like the western languages, including the languages of western Europe. This
discovery surprised linguists and cast doubts on the validity of the traditional Centum-Satem
distinction. But modern linguists have accounted for this discrepancy by concluding the early
ancestors of the Tocharian speakers separated from the either the initial Indo-European people
before the Centum/Satem split occurred, or perhaps from the Centum group after the split with
the Satem speakers occurred. They believe this group of Centum speakers then traveled eastward
separately from the Satem-speaking tribes. The best evidence of this theory is based upon the
location where the Tocharian language was discovered. The area where the language was spoken
in northwestern China lies along the famous Silk Road which was the traditional East-West
trading route linking East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Linguists believe that
the early ancestors of the Tocharians traveled eastward more or less along the trading routes that
later evolved into the Silk Road and eventually found themselves in the territory where relics of
the language were eventually discovered in the twentieth century.

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So at this point in the podcast, there are two things you should know. First, the Centum-Satem
Division – the fact that many linguists still make a very basic division of the Indo-European
languages into two separate groups based upon the way the word hundred was originally
pronounced in those languages. And this split is believed to be based upon an early split within
the original Indo-European-speaking tribes.

Second, the assibilation of the ‘k’ sound – the fact that the ‘k’ sound was observed shifting to an
‘s’ sound within the early Indo-European languages. Again, this process was called
‘assibilation.’ And this change is separate from the change which Jacob Grimm observed within
the Germanic languages where the ‘k’ sound shifted to an ‘h’ sound.

Now let’s turn our attention to the Modern English letter C. In part, this is a story about the letter
C and why it sometimes acts as ‘k’ and sometimes acts as an ‘s’. But this is also a story about
sound shifts and how common they are and how regular they can be. Specifically, this is a story
about one particular sound shift - the assibilation which we have already discussed. This shifting
of sounds to an /s/, /z/, /j/, /ch/, /sh/ etc. This has happened quite often throughout history. And
remember that English as much as any other language has borrowed heavily from other
languages. We have words in our everyday speech that are brand new words – words like
Google, twitter, bromance, and podcast. And we have words from the twentieth century,
nineteenth century, eighteenth century, all the way back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, and
the period before the Dark Ages. We even have words that we use everyday that date back to the
original Indo-European speakers over 4,000 years ago. All of these words are mixed together in
our everyday speech. And many of these words have undergone tremendous changes to get to the
versions we have today. So this story of the letter C will help you to see how sound changes
throughout history affect the sometimes quirky rules we have in Modern English. So letter C.

As you know, when the letter C just appears as a C, it has two possible sounds – the ‘k’ sound
and the ‘s’ sound. At this point you might have noticed a little connection. Yes, these are the
same two sounds that we just talked about in the Centum-Satem divison – the ‘k’ and the ‘s’
sounds. So you may be guessing that there is some assibilation going on somewhere, and you
would be correct.

Let’s go back in time to the origin of Letter C. And it really starts with the Greeks. As you may
recall from the last episode, the Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians who lived in
and around modern-day Lebanon and Syria very early in the first millennium BC. And it is the
same basic alphabet that we have today, but it has undergone a great deal of change through the
centuries. The third letter of the Greek alphabet was ‘gamma.’ You’ve probably heard the
phrase ‘alpha, beta, gamma.’ What you might not know is that gamma represented the /g/ sound
as in the name ‘gamma.’ So the initial Greek phonemes in the Greek alphabet were /a/, /b/, /g/.

The Greeks represented the third letter gamma with a symbol that looked like an upside down
capital L (Ã). Imagine a square and remove the bottom and the right side of the square. Just leave
the top and left side, and you have an upside down L, which was the way the Greeks wrote
gamma – the 3rd letter which was pronounced /g/.

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Now shift forward a few centuries to the Romans. By the time the Romans adopted the Greek
alphabet (indirectly from the Etruscans as you may recall), the sound of the third letter had
eventually shifted from the ‘g’ sound to a ‘k’ sound. If you pronounce both of these sounds, you
can see that they are both in the back of the throat and are very similar. Some linguists think that
this sound-change occurred because the Etruscans, who were the intermediaries here, they took
the alphabet from the Greeks, and the Romans took it from them. The Etruscans apparently did
not distinguish the ‘k’ sound and the ‘g’ sound in their language. So the precise nature of gamma
became confused during this period. And here is the key. By the time the Romans took the
alphabet from those same Etruscans, they took the third letter with a /k/ pronunciation.

So the Romans inherited this letter as a ‘K’-sounding letter. Where the original Greeks often
wrote their letters with chisels on stone or wood, and thus had very angular letters, the Romans
by this point were routinely writing with ink, so they began to change the shape of many of the
letters to the more rounded forms we have today. And they changed the shape from the upside
down letter ‘L’ to the curvy letter C that we have today. So the Romans have modern letter C
with a ‘k’ sound exclusively. It was not used for an ‘s’ sound at this point. The Romans used the
letter S for the ‘s’ sound.

But what happened to the ‘g’ sound. Since gamma became letter C with a ‘k’ sound, that meant
there was no letter for the ‘g’ sound anymore. So the Romans created a new letter to represent the
‘g’ sound which became our letter G. And that is why the capital letter G resembles a capital
letter C. They made the letter G by taking the letter C and simply adding a little line at the end
back towards the center to create a ‘G’.

So the Romans had letter C which represented the /k/ sound. But the Romans also had inherited
the letter K with a ‘k’ sound from the original alphabet, but for whatever reason they rarely used
it. They preferred to use C for the ‘k’ sound. Letter K was largely relegated to the dustbin. And
that’s why you rarely see the letter K in Latin words.

The next step in the story is the adoption of the Roman alphabet by the Germanic tribes.
Remember that Jacob Grimm said that a lot of the ‘k’ sounds in the original Indo-European
language and shifted to an ‘h’ sound in Germanic, like the English word hundred. But also
remember that not all ‘k’ sounds shifted to an ‘h’ sound. Some of the ‘k’ sounds shifted to an
‘h’ and some kept their original ‘k’ sound. So therefore, we still have ‘k’ sounds in the Germanic
languages.

Now initially, the Germanic tribes didn’t bother with the Roman alphabet. Most of the early
Germanic tribes didn’t have writing at all. And when some of the tribes started to develop a
system of writing, they used a runic alphabet which was a collection of runic symbols, which
many people think may have been indirectly linked to the Etruscans as well. But the Germanic
tribes – including the Anglo-Saxons – eventually adopted the Roman alphabet. This reflected the
power, especially the economic power, of the Romans. It also reflects the growing power of the
Church in Europe which used Latin as the official language of the Church.

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When the Anglo-Saxons adopted the Roman alphabet into Old English, the letter C was used
exclusively for the ‘k’ sound. Remember the Romans did have a letter K which they rarely used,
so the Anglo-Saxons didn’t even bother with it. They just used the letter C. For example, the
Old English word for ‘king’ was cyning.

So if we take a snapshot at this point in the late Roman period and in the period known as the
Dark Ages or the Early Middle Ages, the ‘k’ sound was represented almost exclusively by the
letter C. The Anglo-Saxons used it exclusively and the Romans used it almost exclusively.

But after the fall of the Roman Empire, during this period in which the early Germanic kingdoms
began to emerge and the Latin language began to fracture into various regional dialects, a change
started to occur. And it didn’t just occur with the Latin languages or the Germanic languages, it
occurred throughout all of these languages.

And it is at this point that we can introduce our friend ‘assibilation.’ The same sound change that
occurred within the original Indo-European language to create the distinction between the
Centum and Satem languages occurred again at this point. And, as I said, it occurred within a
variety of languages in Western Europe, including Old English, very early French, Spanish and
Italian. And these sound changes created certain confusions in the way words were pronounced
and spelled which is reflected in modern English.

And here is the key. The assibilation didn’t just happen randomly. It happened in certain very
specific ways in all of these languages. And in order to understand what happened here were
have to make a distinction between the various vowels. Now as you probably learned as a child,
we have 5 primary vowels – A, E, I, O and U. But linguists divide these vowels into two groups
– the back vowels and the front vowels. This distinction is actually very important to our story.
The back vowels are the vowels which are pronounced in the back of the mouth – A, O and U.
The front vowels are those pronounced in the front of the mouth – E and I. And here is why that
distinction is so important.

The ‘k’ sound is pronounced in the back of the mouth – like the back vowels A, O and U. So
when the ‘k’ sound preceded one of those back vowels. It stayed the same. This was true
throughout all of those languages. But when the ‘k’ sound came before a front vowel –
pronounced in the front of the mouth like E and I – the sound tended to shift to the front of the
mouth and it tended to produce a hissing or hushing sound. In other words the sound assibilated.
But the exact way it assibilated – in other words the precise assibilated sound that was produced
– varied from language to language.

So lets start with the ‘k’ sound before the back vowels A, O and U. As I said, in these cases, the
‘k’ sound remained just as it was. And we see that in Modern English words like cat, cot and cut
– all are ‘C’ words where the ‘k’ sound was retained before the three back vowels. In fact, as a
general rule in modern English, when the ‘K’ sound appears before an A, O or U in any words
which were inherited from this period, the word is still spelled with its original C and it retains its
original ‘k’ sound. This is the general rule which goes all the way back to the Romans.

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But notice what happens in modern English when the ‘k’ sound appears before the front vowels
E and I. When letter C precedes an E we get words like cell, center, certain, certify, central and
cease. And when letter C precedes the other front vowel ‘I’ we get words like circle, city, circus,
civil and so on. We have the ‘s’ sound. So over time people tended to move that ‘k’ sound from
the throat to the front of the mouth when it appears before the front vowels E and I that are also
pronounced more towards the front of the mouth. That’s assibilation and that is what was
happening to many of these western European languages.

But let’s take a look at how this was happening in the various languages.

Let’s start with the Latin languages:

In Italian, before the E and I, the ‘k’ sound shifted to an ‘ch’ sound. Remember that the ‘ch’
sound is a sibilant like the ‘s’ sound. So we have that Latin word centum meaning hundred.
That word became C-E-N-T-O in Italian, but it is pronounced /chen-toe/ with a ‘ch’ sound. Also
think about the word C-I-A-O in Italian, which is pronounced as /chow/. So the ‘k’ sound
became a ‘ch’ sound before the E and I in many Italian words.

Now lets look at Spanish. Again we see this process of assibilation. Except in Spanish, the ‘k’
sound became an ‘s’ sound before the E and the I. So the Latin word centum evolved within
Spanish and became C-I-E-N-T-O, which is pronounced as /see-en-toe/ with the ‘s’ sound.
Except in Castilian Spanish where the sound shifted to more of a ‘th’ sound, which is another
sibilant. So the pronunciation in Castilian Spanish is more like /thee-en-toe/.

Old French also experienced this change, and it was basically the same as Spanish. Before an E
or an I, the ‘k’ sound shifted to an ‘s’ sound. So Latin centum becomes C-E-N-T in French and
is pronounced /sont/. And remember, this was the same sound shift from /k/ to /s/ that
distinguishes the Centum and Satem languages. So the same sound shift that had occurred within
some of those early Indo-European tribes happened here as well.

For another example, let’s look at a word like cancer which can refer to either a malignant tumor
or a crab (as in the horoscope sign). The link between those two things comes from the crab-like
appearance of swollen veins extending from the tumor. In Latin, the word was pronounced /kan-
ker/. Remember letter C was always pronounced as a ‘k’ in Latin. And we still have that version
of the word in the Modern English word canker – as in canker sore. When the Latin word
canker later evolved into French, it was pronounced /kan-ser/ in keeping with the French
assibilation. The C before the A stayed the same with a /k/ pronunciation. But the C before the E
shifted to an ‘s’ sound. So /ker/ became /ser/. So within that word we can see the assibilation at
work. Of course, both versions of the word passed into Modern English.

And here is the real importance of this French assibilation. After the Norman Conquest of
England in 1066, which was after these sound changes had been completed, we get the forced
introduction of many French words. And as many of those words came into English, they came
in with the French ‘s’ sound in place of the ‘k’ sound before the E and the I. So in the case of the
French word for ‘hundred’ – C-E-N-T pronounced /sont/ – it becomes Anglicized to cent and

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appears in a variety of words like cent (meaning 1/100 of a dollar), century (meaning 100 years),
centennial (meaning 100th anniversary), centipede (a bug with supposedly 100 legs), and many
other words.

But what about Old English itself. Well it experienced its own process of assibilation. Among
the Anglo-Saxons, the ‘k’ sound, which remember was represented by the letter C, became the
‘ch’ sound before an E or I. This is actually very similar to the sound change we saw before in
Italian which produced words like ciento and ciao.

So in Old English, we have the word ‘R-I-C-E’ which meant ‘great or wealthy.’ But it was not
pronounced like ‘rice’ in Modern English. Instead, the ‘ch’ sound had emerged in this context
and the word was pronounced /ree-cheh/. And this is actually the original verison of the Modern
English word rich. During the Middle Ages when the spelling became more standardized, the
spelling of the word was changed to ‘R-I-C-H’ to reflect the pronunciation of the word. But more
on this later.

So to explore this a little further. Let’s compare the Anglo-Saxon language with the Old Saxon
language of their cousins which was still spoken in continental Europe at the time.

Now remember when the Anglo-Saxons made the migration to Britain during the fifth century, it
appears that most of the Angles in continental Europe made this migration because there is very
little record of Angles afterwards. But not all Saxons made the migration. Many Saxons
remained in continental Europe. And so we actually begin to see a distinct difference in dialects.
We have the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ dialect which appears in Britain. But amongst the Saxons who
remained in continental Europe, there was a separate dialect which emerged which is known as
‘Old Saxon.’

So I want to compare a couple of words in the Old English – or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ dialect – and the
‘Old Saxon’ dialect. And we can see how this sound change occurred in the Anglo-Saxon
dialect, but it did not occur within the Saxon dialect which remained in continental Europe.

So in the case of Old English, the word I just gave you was originally spelled ‘R-I-C-E.’ It’s the
original version of the word rich. And that word in Old Saxon, which remember does not have
the Anglo-Saxon sound shift, was spelled ‘R-I-K-I’ and was pronounced /ree-kee/ with a ‘k’
sound. But remember in Old English, it was pronounced /ree-cheh/. So it had experienced that
shift from the ‘k’ sound to the ‘ch’ sound in Old English. And as I said, that is the original
version of the modern word rich.

A similar word – at least in spelling – was a word which was spelled ‘C-I-R-I-C-E.’ So basically
that same word we just looked at, but put ‘C-I’ at the beginning – so ‘C-I-R-I-C-E.’ In Old
Saxon, that word was spelled ‘K-I-R-I-K-A’ and was pronounced /keh-ree-kah/, which again
gives both of those consonants the ‘k’ sound. But in Old English, we have the assibilation. So
that word becomes cirice – pronounced /cheh-ree-cheh/. And cirice is the original version of the
modern word church. Again, over time that word evolved from Old English into Modern
English as church, but we see the original version there with that assibilation.

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We also have an Old English Anglo-Saxon word spelled ‘C-I-L-D.’ And the pronunciation of
that word eventually evolved from its original /kild/ to /child/. And that is the original spelling of
the modern word child. During later Middle English, and then into Modern English, the spelling
of the word ‘C-I-L-D’ is changed to ‘C-H-I-L-D’ to reflect the change in pronunciation.

So even though the ‘k’ sound generally shifted to a ‘ch’ sound in Old English before the E and
the I, it didn’t always make this change. And this is actually very important. Sometimes the ‘k’
sound was retained.

So in Old English we have the word ‘C-Y-N-I-N-G.’ Now the letter Y has essentially the same
characteristics here as the letter I. But we did not get a sound shift there. It did not become /chee-
ning/. It remained /kee-ning/. And cyning is the original version of the modern word king. And
so you still see that original spelling – ‘C-Y-N-I-N-G’ – in old texts. But again it retained its ‘k’
sound. It did not shift to a ‘ch.’

Also, the original Old English version of the word keen was originally spelled ‘C-E-N-E’ in Old
English. Again, for some reason, it retained its original ‘k’ sound.

So now let’s flash forward to the Middle Ages and Middle English after England was invaded by
the Norman French.

If we look at Middle English, and specifically this issue of the C before the E and I, what we see
is a hodge-podge of the rules which we just talked about.

In a lot of the native Old English words, the C was being pronounced with a ‘ch’ sound to reflect
the assibilation which Old English had experienced. So a word like ‘R-I-C-E’ was being
pronounced as /ree-cheh/. But sometimes the C was still being pronounced as a ‘k’ sound. So
that word ‘C-Y-N-I-N-G’ – the original version of the word king – was still being pronounced as
/kee-ning/ with the original ‘k’ sound. So in some cases that C had shifted to a ‘ch’ sound, and in
a few other cases it had retained its original ‘k’ sound. But then there were all of those words
which had come in through French. where the C was now pronounced as an ‘s’ sound under the
French assibilation – words like ‘C-E-N-T’ which were being pronounced as /sont/ and
eventually Anglicized to cent.

So at that point, there were really three different pronunciations for the C. It could have the
original ‘k’ sound. It could have the Old English sound shift and be a ‘ch’ sound. Or it could
have the French sound shift and be an ‘s’ sound.

Now in everyday speech, this wasn’t really a problem. Words were just pronounced as words.
But for those increasing number of people who were literate, and the scribes who had to write
down and read these words, it was problem. If you came across an unfamiliar word where a C
preceded an E or an I, how did you pronounce it? Was it a ‘k’ sound, a ‘ch’ sound or an ‘s’
sound? If you didn’t know the origin of the word – and very few people did – you had to guess at
it.

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So it was during this period that scribes began to adopt certain rules to deal with these issues.
And they are basically the rules we have today.

Remember that at this point in history, a C before a back vowel (A, O, U) didn’t change. It
remained a ‘k’ sound just as it had always been, and just as it remains today. So we see that in
words like cat, cot, cut, carry, car, cap, and on and on. So whenever we have a C before an A, O
or U, we are looking at the oldest use of the C with its original ‘k’ sound – the same way the
Romans and the original Anglo-Saxons used it. So in those cases, the letter C was retained
because in this context – before the A, O and U – all of the languages had retained the original
‘k’ pronunciation. So it was clear how the C was pronounced in those cases. The C was left in
place, and it continued to represent the ‘k’ sound.

But what about the C before the front vowels E and I? This is where it became much more
complicated in Middle English, because there were three different possible pronunciations – /ch/,
/k/ or /s/.

Middle English attempted to sort out this hodge-podge. And they did it by adopting certain
spelling rules. So let’s look at those rules.

First, for many of the Old English words which had developed the ‘ch’ pronunciation, Middle
English scribes assigned the letter combination ‘C-H’ for the sound. So ‘R-I-C-E’ (pronounced
/ree-cheh/) came to be spelled ‘R-I-C-H,’ and thus our Modern English word rich. The word ‘C-
I-R-I-C-E’ (pronounced /cheh-ree-cheh/) was reinvented with the letter combination ‘C-H’ and
eventually became our modern word church. And the word ‘C-I-L-D’ became ‘C-H-I-L-D’ to
reflect its pronunciation, and thus became our modern English word child. So the scribes were
reflecting the sound change which had occurred in these Old English words where the ‘k’ sound
had evolved into the ‘ch’ sound. And they did it by simply spelling the words phonetically using
the letters C-H to reflect that ‘ch’ sound.

So what about those words where the C had either the ‘k’ sound or the ‘s’ sound. Well, to reflect
the way those words were pronounced, the Middle English scribes adopted the French rules
which the French scribes had been using to deal the same issue in France. This also reflects the
overall power and influence of French at the time.

So since the French were pronouncing the C as an ‘s’ sound before and E or an I, the Middle
English scribes went along with that rule and retained the C where it was being pronounced as an
S. So cent retains its French spelling – ‘C-E-N-T.’ And the vast hoard of French words which
contained the letter C before an E or an I were brought into English, and English retained the
letter C to reflect this French pronunciation of the ‘s’ sound. And this is still the default
pronunciation rule for C in Modern English. A C before an E or an I is generally pronounced as
an ‘s.’

But what about those words where Old English had retained the ‘k’ sound before an E or an I.
Remember that a word like cyning – the original version of the word king – was spelled C-Y-N-
I-N-G. Well, remember Old English only used a letter C. They didn’t have the letter K in Old

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English. And the standard French rules of pronunciation would suggest that if you put the C at
the beginning of that word – C-Y-N-I-N-G – it should be pronounced as an ‘s’, but it wasn’t. I
mean England was ruled by a cyning, not a /see-ning/ or a /chee-ning/. It is at this point that the
Middle English scribes resurrected the largely forgotten letter K from the dustbin.

Remember that the K had not been used Old English and was rarely used by the Romans. But the
French had been using it. In fact, the French had to deal with their own assibilation issues. When
the ‘k’ sound switched to an ‘s’ sound in French before the front vowels, the French had to find a
way to distinguish those words from the words where the ‘k’ sound was being retained. So they
began using the letter K to indicate the ‘k’ sound before those letters.

So the French-influenced scribes did the same thing in Middle English. They assigned the letter
K in instances where a C retained its original ‘k’ sound before the E or the I. So Old English ‘C-
Y-N-I-N-G’ became ‘K-I-N-G’ with a brand new K at the beginning. Remember the K was
inserted to eliminate any confusion as to the proper pronunciation. So today in Modern English
when the ‘k’ sound appears before an E or an I, we still typically use the letter K to make that
clear. So think about words like kite, king, kettle, keg. All of these words have a K at the
beginning instead of a C. And the reason it has that K is to make it clear to the reader that those
words are pronounced with a ‘k’ sound, whereas if a C was inserted there, the tendency would be
to pronounce it with an ‘s’ sound.

It should be noted that K is also sometimes used before the other vowels – A, O and U, but this
usually represents words that have been borrowed into English from other languages, especially
Scandinavian languages. Sometimes also words that come from other sources. Think of the word
kangaroo which comes from Australian aboriginal languages.

So there you have it, all you need to know about the letter C and assibilation. Hopefully, you
find that interesting. But even if you don’t, the real point of this discussion was to illustrate how
common sound changes are, and how common certain sound changes are among various
languages. These sound changes often reflect mechanical aspects of speech that are a product of
the human mouth and vocal chords, and they’re not necessarily unique to any particular language.
Again, they’re just a product of our human biology.

In our next episode, we will turn our attention back to the original Indo-European language. To
this point, we have discussed how the original Indo-European language was at least partially
reconstructed. In the next episode, we are going to look at the reconstructed language itself. And
based upon those reconstructed words, we will try to figure out who those original Indo-
Europeans were. Today, linguists are reasonably certain that they know where and when these
people lived. And based upon the archaeological evidence, we can learn even more about them.
And from there, we look at how those people spread around the world, and specifically how they
spread into western Europe and led to the eventual creation of the Greek, Latin, Celtic and
Germanic languages – including of course English.

So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English Podcast.

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