Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Letter Cc

Last night I could not sleep for the life of me and it was all because of the letter Cc. I will also manage to prove that one does not need to be "smart" to be a nerd. I also need to remind you that I have a bachelor's in Linguistics....that explains a little, although not much because I can't recall much about my theoretical syntax, historical linguistics, or semantic classes.
Yesterday Sydney came home from preschool announcing that this week will be spent learning the letter Cc. I started thinking about it. The more I was thinking about it, the more I realized how little the "C" is in our language. The hard C makes a /k/ sound (cake, cup, music....)and the soft C makes an /s/ sound (cylinder, centipede, century...). Even with a blend it has a /k/ sound (clock, christmas, cry..) with the exception of "Ch" (church, chaste, munch...) So what I'm saying is that besides Ch words, the C doesn't have it's own sound, thus only making our language that much more difficult for second language learners, or young learners such as Sydney who spells cat "kat." In addition, I found a new pet peeve... words that have a ck in it like suck, luck, clock, knock,etc. What is the point of a c and k put together? It's kinda like a double negative. We already know the k makes a /k/ sound putting a c in front of it only states the obvious and is unnecessary to me. When I was teaching my dad always told me, "Keep it simple, stupid." I know it sounds horrible like he was calling me stupid, but he wasn't; he was he was saying, "you don't need to make things complicated." I feel the same with our language. There are so many more examples of how complicated our language is, I just chose this particular one. I don't know if this makes sense to anyone else. All I know is that it was keeping me up last night and I was wondering where it all originated from too. Yes, diving into phonetics and historical linguistics; my professors would be so proud. I think if I get a PHd in Linguistics I just thought of my dissertation to write upon. NERD ALERT.

5 comments:

Coordination Queen said...

You make me laugh! I've wondered why they use so many different letters to make the same sounds and who came up with them, but that's about as far as I got, before I got distracted. Shocker.

Carrie said...

I am rolling over in complete and utter laughter WOW you are so funny! I wish I could have heard that in person!

Bowen Family said...

You are hilarious. Those kind of things get on my nerves too. I definitely think you should get a PhD!

Luisa said...

I think about that stuff too (I guess it's the English degree in me:) Recently I was thinking, what is the point of having silent letters like the "k" in knife??? Seriously what is up with that. It is so unnecessary. You make good points about the C. I wonder why the "alphabet inventor" decided we needed two letters that make the same sound.
P.S. I remember your dad telling me to "Keep it simple stupid" too:) Ahh, good memories

Melissa said...

As a fellow geek...I love you for posting this.