C, the Sütterlin letter c

History

The letter C is the 3rd letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ before front vowels in loanwords, or a voiceless velar plosive /k/ before back vowels and in native consonant clusters like 'ch' and 'ck'.

Sütterlin lowercase c simplifies the hook into a clean, upright curved stroke in the central zone with an open right side and a small introductory notch. Capital C is an open upright oval curve spanning the upper two zones, clear and uncluttered for school children.

In native German words, c almost never stands alone; it functions almost entirely within the digraph 'ch' and trigraph 'sch', as well as the geminate 'ck'. In Latinate legal and ecclesiastic terms ('Copulation', 'Curator', 'Contract'), standalone C was standard in parish registers until the twentieth-century spelling reforms.

C descends from the Phoenician gimel, which had the sound g.^[1] The Etruscans had no use for a g, so they changed the letter's value to k before e and i,^[2] and with that value the sign C passed into the Latin alphabet.^[3]