Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language and the people who contributed to that history.

In the last episode, we looked at how Jacob Graham and other early linguists discovered

a very specific set of rules to identify the way in which ancient Indo-European words

became Germanic words.

That included a set of specific sound changes, which also permit linguists to reconstruct

large portions of the original ancient Indo-European language.

In this episode, I want to focus on one specific set of sound changes, which early linguists

used to classify the Indo-European languages.

And then I want to digress a bit and explore this concept of sound changes a little bit

further.

As you'll see, some of the very same sound shifts that were identified within the original

Indo-European language are still reflected in certain aspects of modern English.

And specifically, we can see the same type of sound shift in the modern English letter

C, which is used to identify both the K sound and the S sound.

Have you ever wondered why we have a letter C at all?

Why not just a K or an S?

Well I'll answer that question in this episode.

This is the story of the Kintum versus the Satum languages, and the history of the letter

C.

The letter C is one of the more challenging aspects of English for small children learning

to read and write English, and for that matter, some adult speakers of other languages

...