Alphabetical by Michael Rosen

was in control of when, where, how often, and at what pace.
    All this seems a far cry from a ‘Phonics Screening Check’ delivered to children at the age of six in order to determine how well every child can sound out letters and read them in lists of real and nonsense words. The claim I heard being made by a minister is that this teaching method and the test will ‘eradicate illiteracy’. We shall see.

• ‘C’ STARTS OUT LIFE as ‘gimel’ in Phoenician. Its shape was something like a walking stick or the number 1 without a serif on the bottom. In fact, it meant a stick as used by a hunter, perhaps something like a boomerang. The Greeks called it ‘gamma’ and when they switched their writing to run from left to right, they flipped the hunting stick. Some Greek settlers in Italy preferred a crescent-shaped ‘gamma’. The Etruscans turned the hard ‘g’ of ‘gamma’ into a ‘k’ sound. The Romans added the serifs and created the elegant thin-thick line.
    c
    This is of course just a small version of ‘C’ and it appeared in manuscripts from around AD 500.
    PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME
    The Normans would have pronounced the letter as ‘say’, as in modern French, and the Great Vowel Shift turned it to ‘see’.
    PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER
    If you’ve been saying ‘Julius Seezer’ for ‘Julius Caesar’ you are both right and wrong: right because that’s how we say it, but wrong because the Romans of the time pronounced it ‘Kye-’ (rhyming with our ‘rye’) ‘-sar’ or ‘-zar’. This is yet another indication of how everything in language changes. By the time the Roman Empire was in decline some people were turning the ‘k’ sound into ‘ch’ – a sound that persists in English with a loan word like ‘cello’.
    The Normans arrived in Britain pronouncing the lone ‘c’ as soft ‘s’ – think ‘city’ and ‘civil’.
    If spelling were a matter of a purely rational divvying-out of letters to match sounds, then all soft ‘s’ sounds would be indicated with ‘s’, and all hard ‘k’ sounds with the ‘k’; the ‘c’ could be buried with Caesar. Instead, we have ‘c’ which can be the ‘s’ sound of ‘ceiling’ or the ‘k’ sound of ‘cut’ or ‘picnic’. You can have a ‘tic’ or a ‘tick’; an ‘e’ following ‘c’ in a single-syllable word or the last syllable of a word tells us to use a soft ‘s’ – ‘pace’, ‘police’. To tell us to say ‘k’, we write ‘ache’ – double it and we say both ‘k’ and ‘s’: ‘accept’. From at least as early as 1606, scholars were on to this criminal state of affairs. Playwright and poet Ben Jonson – no stranger to crime himself (he avoided execution for a murder he committed) – thought that we should have been ‘spared’ the ‘c’ letter but felt that it was already too late to quarrel with those who had laid it down in the first place.
    In French, ‘c’ is soft when it is followed by an ‘e’ or ‘i’ and hard when it is followed by an ‘a’, ‘o’ or ‘u’ . . . unless a ‘cedilla’ has been stuck to its bottom. This little sign (a figure 5 without a hat) tells us that the colloquial ‘ça’ is pronounced ‘sa’. Whether the cedilla outlasts the smartphone keypad epoch is another matter.
    â€˜C’ combines with all the vowels along with ‘r’ to make ‘crab’ ‘cress’, ‘crisis’, ‘cross’ and ‘crunch’, with ‘l’ to make ‘clam’, clench’, ‘clip’, ‘close’ and ‘clunk’ and with a