BZOVIUS, Abraham (Pol. Bente/ski), Polish scholar and divine: b. Proszowice, near Miechow, 1567; d. Rome, 31 Jan. 1637. At the request of Pope Paul V, he spent several years of the latter part of his life in the Vatican, as librarian of the Virginio dei Ursini, and actively engaged in literary pursuits. He was a member of the order of the Dominicans, one of the most voluminous writers of his age, gained for him self a high reputation as professor of philoso phy and theology at Milan and Bologna, and crowned the labors of his life by continuing the celebrated ecclesiastical annals of Caesar Baro thus, who had left them off at the year 1198, and completed only 12 volumes. Bzovius car ried them to the year 1532, in nine volumes.
third character of the English alphabet and of all the alphabets de rived from the Latin. In its present form it is a modification of the primitive Greek gamma. That primitive form was < , an angle with vertex pointing to the left; it is the reverse of the ancient Phoenician > , which points to the right, and of the Old Hebrew gimel, >. The Latin C (used also by the Greeks to some extent) is the ancient Greek < retained by the Greeks of Italy and rounded, just as the later Greek gamma sym bol, r, is the angular symbol erected by the Eastern Greeks. The Russian alphabet retains the Greek symbol r, but its place is fourth, because in that alphabet the sign for the denti labial V holds the third place. The Greek gamma (< , r,) seems to have always repre sented the same sonant guttural as the English g in °go.° In the Latin alphabet of the Romans, as represented in their earliest in scriptions, the C stood for the same sonant gut tural as in the Greek, g hard; for example, lecio, later written legso. macistratus, later magistratus; yet at the same time the C repre sented also the surd guttural K, as it still does in English except before the vowels e and i and the diphthongs ce and ce in words from the Latin. Thus the early Latin alphabet was with out the symbol K. There is in this use of the character C in ancient Roman epigraphy ground for the inference that the early Romans con founded the two gutturals k and g hard, as in some localities or in some classes of people the termination ing becomes ink, and "something" becomes asomethink.° But at a later period the distinction between g hard and k was recog nized, and then for the designation of the mute guttural the kappa (K) of the Greek alphabet came into use in Latin writing. But the k was afterward rejected, and its only use in Latin was in writing the word Kalendcr (abbreviated to kal. or k.) and as an abbreviation of Car thago (Carthage) and of the personal name Ctrs°. No doubt the persistence of k in kalendir was due to the adherence of the Pontifices to the antique forms of the official calendars; and the K standing for the fore name Cmso was retained as a means of abbre viating that name and distinguishing it from the abbreviation of the name Caius: C.. Julius
Czsar is Gaius, but K. Fabius Ambustus is Czso. But the k having been discarded from the Latin alphabet, its function was assigned to the symbol C, while for representation of the sonant guttural a modified form of C was adopted, namely, the G with the value of g in (go.) The soft g, eaual to j, was probably un known to the Romans before the general de basement of the Latin laneuasre. After the symbol k had been discarded and been super seded by C, the symbol C, with the power of gamma, was retained as an initial abbreviation of Gaius, name for a man, and of Gaia (with C reversed 0), the name of a woman. C was also retained in the formula Cn. as an abbrevia tion of Gnzus. This use of the initial C as representing g hard (sonant guttural) recalls the primitive equivalence for the Romans of the two gutturals k and g hard; but the modern Latinists, unacquainted with such use of C, have usually pronounced Gaius °Kaius° and Cnzus instead of "Gnus" and aGnzus.° In the Anglo-Saxon, its .alphabet having been derived from the Latin, the C had everywhere the value of K, and the same is to be said of the Garlic; that fact gives presump tive proof that at the first contact of the Garlic and Germanic races with men of Latin speech the C in all situations was equivalent to k in Latin; and the German word Kaiser is proof that when the Germans first heard of Julius and the Czsars who succeeded him the head of the Roman state was "Kaisar? not "Cavan" The change in the pronunciation of C from k to s, as in French and English, to ch as in Italian, to is as in German, appears to have come about after the fall of the Roman empire.
In Anglo-Saxon the original Germanic K sound of C undergoes palatalization, ending in the English ch; cf. Germanic kerl, A. S. ceorl, English churl. In some cases a word is trans ferred into English from Scandinavian or a non-palatalizing dialect, giving us a k-sound and a ch-sound side by side; cf. churl and carle, cheap and toper, church and kirk. In words of true Indo-European descent, English C corre sponds to original g, as Eng. tug, Lat. duco. To aprimitive C, h corresponds in English, as Gr. ith‘ni Lat. canis, Eng. hound. There is no q in Anglo-Saxon and Old English, so cwao is written for the modern quoth. Similarly, cyning is written for king.
As an abbreviation, C stands for a musical note, for Centigrade, for 100, for the name Gaius. c. stands for cent, for centime, for circa (about). Cn. stands for the name Gnaius. B. C. stands for before Christ.
C. G. S., or CENTIMETER-GRAM SECOND. See METRIC SYSTEM, THE.