The general rule is:
If you’re using the word as a verb (e.g. to advise/advising, to practise/practising, to license/licensing), it’s spelt with an ‘s’.
If you’re using it as a noun (e.g. a licence, a practice, good advice), it’s a ‘c’.
Now aren’t we glad a ‘c’ in Welsh never makes an ‘s’ sound?!
Ia, diolch. And about this “c” in welsh, I remeber a long article in a paper, about the name of the police on the official cars. Some were saying “polic” and someone said it could not be because then it vould be said “polik”, the welsh c sounhing as a K.
Well, if you wanted a word spelled in Welsh sounding like english Police, it would be “polîs”, because the c is a “k” sound. However, the Welsh word for Police (which is written on police cars in Wales) is heddlu.
Yes Hendrik I agree, I was just reffering to a sort of conflict that there was (I don’t remember when) between a local police and the official decisions, concerning the name to be given to the welsh police on the cars. It seemed that Heddlu was not agreed. But that was in a newspaper I don’t remember when, , and I can’t give you any reference, maybe it’s an old conflict…
John Young said “After 60 years with English, I have come to the conclusion that I will never master it. I’ll concentrate on Welsh from here on”
Sure that welsh asks for big concentration. Another 60 years ? That’s why, considering my age and the difficulty of the language, I consider welsh is surely my last “language love story”.
When you’ve been raised speaking and writing in English, it seems normal to you, and you don’t always think about just how weird some of it really is. The list of rules for the English language is long, complex, and filled with things that contradict each other. ‘U’ is always a vowel, yet we have words like ‘penguin’ and ‘suave’. And don’t get me started on ‘colonel’. My theory is that some linguists got together one day and said, “Hey, let’s make a language that’s as confusing and nonsensical as humanly possible!”
This is like my theory in regards to the post-Easter uprising promulgation of a single school of Irish that doesn’t resemble any of the older Gaeltacht tongues…