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Comment by laylomo2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a linguist, but I always love finding (possible) examples of hard C in Latin in other languages. For instance "Caesar" is borrowed into German as "Kaiser", and the borrowing of Latin "piscis" into Albanian as "peshk" appears to me as another example of that vestigial hard C.

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Another example is Sardinian. From the wikipedia page about the Sardinian phonology:

"Preservation of the plosive sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ before front vowels /e/ and /i/; for example, centum ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_phonology

The Caesarea area in Israel is pronounced with the hard C in Hebrew. I wonder if that Latin influence or an artefact of Hebrew itself.

Turkish also retains the hard C in some forms, the city of Kayseri in Asia Minor is also from Caesarea. However some of that has been eradicated by the more recent influence of French. An example of that is Julius Caesar, which is Jül Sezar.

Modern hebrew gets the name from the Mishnaic hebrew name for the city. It's also spelled with a unvoiced glottal in arabic. Note that Israel was in the hellenistic part of the empire, and caesarea was very much a greek speaking city, where there wasn't palatalization of latin c (which was rendered as a kappa). Note russian Czar.

My understanding is that both would have been derived from Phoenician which was itself from a Proto-Indo-European origin.

No... first hebrew is basically just a dialect of Phoenician, and phoenecian isn't an indo european language! It's semitic, like arabic and Akkadian. Also the name Casesarea is of course from Caesar (the city was founded in honor of Augustus by Herod)

It's not just the name of the city קיסריה [Keisariya], but also the title of the imperor - "Caesar" - קֵיסָר [keisar].

Why some Romance languages had the hard C sound lost before e and i?

Because of palatalization [0], a very common sound change.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)

Thanks for the insight!

A similar process is currently ongoing in some English dialects with initial t/d. "Tuesday" and "choose day" are homophones for some British speakers. It may well morph into "shoes jay" within another century or two. Or not. Sound changes tend to follow patterns but they are not really predictable.

Thank you, very interesting. Is this across the whole language, or rather localized to some areas (geographic or other).

Also as a French walking in the street and saying Tuesday and choose day loud in the street, I got a few curious stares :)

Only when written, of course.

In Italian the written letters ce and ci are pronounced with a soft c.

There are plenty of words with a hard c (a k) followed by an e or an i. Italian alphabet doesn't have a k character so those sounds are written as che and chi. That is, in Italian ch is the k sound. Most (all?) of the other languages of the area use ch for a soft c.

That reminds me of "pescatarian" in English, and "pescado" in Spanish: both use a hard C sound.

The C is always hard before an A, O an U, in Spanish and Italian, the soft one is before E and I.

To have the hard C in Italian an H needs to be added, CHE or CHI (while in Spanish that leads to something more like tch).

And of course Tsar & czar, also from Caesar.

Those are using a tz sound, similar to the zz in pizza. It's probably closer to the "s" in English pronunciation of "Caesar" than it is to the K used in Caesar's time.

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