s Gaius and Gnaeus by C. and Cn. respectively. On the early
inscription discovered in the Roman Forum in 1899 the letter occurs but
once, in the form [Illustration] written from right to left. The broad
lower end of the symbol is rather an accidental pit in the stone than an
attempt at a diacritic mark--the word is _regei_, in all probability the
early dative form of _rex_, "king." It is hard to decide why Latin adopted
the _g_-symbol with the value of _k_, a letter which it possessed
originally but dropped, except in such stereotyped abbreviations as K. for
the proper name _Kaeso_ and _Kal._ for _Calendae_. There are at least two
possibilities: (1) that in Latium _g_ and _k_ were pronounced almost
identically, as, _e.g._, in the German of Wuerttemberg or in the Celtic
dialects, the difference consisting only in the greater energy with which
the _k_-sound is produced; (2) that the confusion is graphic, K being
sometimes written [Illustration] which was then regarded as two separate
symbols. A further peculiarity of the use of C in Latin is in the
abbreviation for the district _Subura_ in Roma and its adjective
_Suburanus_, which appears as SVC. Here C no doubt represents G, but there
is no interchange between _g_ and _b_ in Latin. In other dialects of Italy
_b_ is found representing an original voiced guttural (_gw_), which,
however, is regularly replaced by _v_ in Latin. As the district was full of
traders, _Subura_ may very well be an imported word, but the form with C
must either go back to a period before the disappearance of _g_ before _v_
or must come from some other Italic dialect. The symbol G was a new coinage
in the 3rd century B.C. The pronunciation of C throughout the period of
classical Latin was that of an unvoiced guttural stop (_k_). In other
dialects, however, it had been palatalized to a sibilant before _i_-sounds
some time before the Christian era; _e.g._ in the Umbrian _facia_ = Latin
_facial_. In Latin there is no evidence for the interchange of _c_ with a
sibilant earlier than the 6th century A.D. in south Italy and the 7th
century A.D. in Gaul (Lindsay, _Latin Language_, p. 88). This change has,
however, taken place in all Romance languages except Sardinian. In
Anglo-Saxon _c_ was adopted to represent the hard stop. After the Norman
conquest many English words were re-spelt under Norman influence. Thus
Norman-French spelt its palatalized _c_-sound (_=tsh_) with _ch_ as in
_cher_ and the English palat