Additional Illuminated letter "C"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.
C is the third letter in the English alphabet and a letter of the alphabets of many other writing systems which inherited it from the Latin alphabet. It is also the third letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is named cee (pronounced /ˈsiː/) in English.
"C" comes from the same letter as "G". The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)".
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| C in other languages. |
' form in Early Etruscan, then '
' in Classical Etruscan. In Latin it eventually took the 'c' form in Classical Latin. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters 'c k q' were used to represent the sounds /k/ and /ɡ/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, 'q' was used to represent /k/ or /ɡ/ before a rounded vowel, 'k' before 'a', and 'c' elsewhere. During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for /ɡ/, and 'c' itself was retained for /k/. The use of 'c' (and its variant 'g') replaced most usages of 'k' and 'q'. Hence, in the classical period and after, 'g' was treated as the equivalent of Greek gamma, and 'c'
as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek
words, as in 'KAΔMOΣ', 'KYPOΣ', and 'ΦΩKIΣ' came into Latin as 'cadmvs', 'cyrvs' and 'phocis', respectively. Read more . . . 
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