In English words with C usually have a K sound while words with a CH have a CH sound - perhaps it is the same in some other languages. In Italian and perhaps some other languages it is exactly reversed. I was wondering how that could happen. Having different sounds for the same letter is weird enough but having the sounds from two types of letters have the exact opposite sounds for each is bizarre. Is it like American english where they just deliberately wanted to be different to UK english (something like that) ?
I’m not so sure it’s as clear cut as you make it out to be. The “ch” dipthong almost as commonly makes the sound like in “choose” as it does in “school”. Similarly, ‘c’ alone can make a sound like a k, an s.
Ok so for school the “CH” is similar to the “CH” in Italian…
And it’s not that clear-cut in Italian, either. Ca-, co-, and cu- are all hard c sounds; only ce- and ci- are the English ch- sound. In Italian, the “h” functions with the c and g simply as an indicator of hard or soft pronunciation. Similar to how the “u” in Spanish changes the g sound to hard.
I have to assume these all evolved quite independently of each other, and especially independent of English pronunciation and orthography.
There are four pronunciations of “ch” in English:
church (Germanic or Spanish words)
chemistry (Greek)
machine (French)
loch (Gaelic)
I think your question is a very interesting one. Why did English choose to represent the sound of “church” with a c+h digraph? And in general, why is there a collection of consonant digraphs in English with consonant+h (“ch”,“th”,“ph”)? I think the answer to that second question is that Latin chose to represent the Greek letters chi, theta and phi with those digraphs, and then they were established and “available” for European languages to adopt for their own needs.
And in English, ca-, co-, and cu- are all also hard c sounds (there may be exceptions but I can’t think of any). And ce- and ci- are the English soft c (although when preceded by s they are sometimes pronounced as sh, such as prescient, which also the case in Italian).
Given that English has north of 40 sounds and only 26 letters, it’s hardly weird. Letters loosely correlate to sounds, but pronunciations change and spelling is often preserved. This could just be a case of a palatal consonant shifting to a velar stop in some situations and an alveolar affricate in others, but I don’t know much about Italian.
And I continue to hate kindergarten teachers for teaching this hard/soft nonsense.
Yeah, “hard” and “soft” are not terms in phonetics, but primary education misleads our citizens to think that they are.
The terms you want are:
Italian ca, che, chi co, cu; English k: velar stop
Italian cia, ce, ci, cio, ciu; English ch: palatal affricate
Please note that the letter i in three of the above Italian examples (cia, cio, ciu) is not pronounced as a vowel; it’s there only to mark the palatal affricate pronunciation. Therefore ciabatta, focaccia, and the Italian form of my name, Giovanna, have only 3 syllables each, not 4.
Ah so it stays palatal. I don’t have a good ear for those.
I mean how different letters have different sounds between different languages.
And bruschetta is obviously pronounced broosketta, but waiters look at you like you’re from outer space.
Oh, brother, don’t get me started. :mad: 
I blame Geddy Lee’s uncle.
Uh, I would have said in Spanish the “u” makes the “g” be a “soft” g rather than a “hard” j. (I know that’s not truly the phonetic terms, it’s the ones we used in school before getting to the year where we had phonetics - I’m afraid I never understood more than half of the technical terms; actually, in our case it was “weak/soft” and “strong/harsh”).
Interesting. Well, the “j” is pronounced “harsher” in Spain (where it’s not far from the “ch” in Scottish English “loch”) than it is in, say, Mexico (where it’s basically like an English “h”), so I can see how the “g” sound (as in “guerra”) could be considered in some sense “softer”.
This would be reinforced by the fact that the same “g” phoneme, for many Spanish speakers, truly is “soft” to the point of almost disappearing, in certain situations – namely, before the sound spelled “w” in English. Thus, all those “Guada-” place names, from an Arabic word for “water” (or is it “river?”), a word usually written in English as “wadi”. And, thus, the “guey”/“buey” confusion among Mexican hipsters. And, the tee shirts in a font created for a certain 1977 film which read:
“Estar Guars”
Other examples of the disappearing “g” sound before “w” sound: huaraches/guaraches, Huatulco/Guatulco, and huamil/guamil all being acceptable alternatives, in certain regions and/or in certain eras.
Okay, I’ll stop there.
You left out güiski, also known as *juiki *or juiski and sometimes pronounced uiski 
And IIUC, the guada is river. Funnily enough, we now have wadis in Spain - but they’re something that’s called arroyos in the American SW (in Spain an arroyo is a tiny rivulet, but one that’s permanent; the wadis are dry in the dry season).
Guatever!
No no that’s guadeba.