orthography - What is the origin of the different pronunciations of C and G before different vowels?


In English the letters C and G usually have different pronunciation before a/o/u and before e/i. The same is true for Romance languages - French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian etc.


What is the origin of this? I guess that it has something to do with different pronunciations of these letters in Latin, but is there a proper source that explains how did this happen in Latin and how did it come do English, too?


Thank you!




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?