I mean, with the english language, there are so many things we have that seem practically useless, (like silent letters) but what’s the origin behind the letter C? We have a K, and an S, so why do we need a C? The only purpose I can think of for it would be “ch” words like “cheese” because they’re slightly different from the “sh” sound.
http://www.ecphorizer.com/EPS/site_page.php?issue=7&page=29
Kontinuing cis proses, eeir after eeir we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. Bai 1969, wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainali keim tru.
A bit odd to use the same “i” for the vowel in “his” and in “drims”, “wi”, “hapi”, etc. Particularly when you’re also using “e” for “be”, “ce”, “we” (with a different spelling from before?), etc. (And also using “e” for “cer”?). I must say, I find this joke bafflingly unable to stand scrutiny.
First: Awesome username / post combo 
Secondly: because we adapted our alphabet from the Greeks (the C is the westernized form of their third letter, gamma), and was used as a hard “c”. Once we started mating with other languages around the time of the Norman Conquest, particularly the French language, their intrusions into our language brought their unique sounds, and spelling with a “c” instead of an “s” or whatever was our way of showing that this word came from the French.
(Disclosure: the above is a very simple rehashing of what I learned from 5 minutes poking around on Wikipedia.)
Watch, catch, hitch. chard, choose… Richard… stiches. ICU. ick etc.
This explanation is good enough for me.
Sorry, you got it stuck in my head and I have to spread the joy.
But that isn’t what we have the letter C. The CH combination could be better represented by a single letter, since it’s a unique phoneme. AS has been pointed out, C was brought into English as the hard K sound and only later morphed into being the multi-use and largely pointless letter it is.
If you were designing English from the ground up you’d have way more letters and you either wouldn’t have C at all, since 96% of the time its purpose can be filled by K or S, or you would have it but use it ONLY to denote the CH sound, and wouldn’t use it in any other context. ICU would be IKU, since logically “Kare” would supersede “Care.”
Similarly, we are missing letters to represent the SH and TH sounds, and a lot of vowel sounds.
When Sequoyah invented the writing system for Cherokee he came up with something like 75-80 symbols to represent the syllabary of the language. That’s not exactly the way we do it, with phonemes, but it’s interesting to note that with a perfectly original style of writing - Sequoyah was himself totally illiterate and invented the system from scratch by himself just because he observed that Anglophones got a lot of benefit out of being able to put their language on paper with little scribbles - the Cherokee went from nearly-total illiteracy to a literacy rate rivalling any nation on earth in just a matter of a few years, because the system perfectly mirrored the language.
It’s an old complaint, but English, written, contains so many logical inconsistencies that it adds a significant amount of difficulty in mastering reading and writing. My 6-year-old can’t read a book without at least once saying “why is it spelled THAT way?” and me having no better answer than “Well, honey, some words are spelled really weird.” Of course, this is in part because English changes, borrows and steals words, changed meanings and pronounciations and is in general an amazing, evolving, fantastic language, so you get a lot of good with the bad. But truth be told, the way we use the letter C is stupid.
Bolding mine. What languages exactly is this not true for? Are languages with a saner spelling system less amazing, evolving, and fantastic?
Don’t even have to click.
First thing I though of too. 
What are you, some kind of cooc ?
I read a joke like this called “euroenglish” it’s funny also
This is another way to tell this story: The Proto-Indo-European palatovelar (sounded a bit like “ch” in Scottish “loch” or German “Bach”) became an “s” sound in “satem” languages (Hindi, Russian…), and a “k” sound in “centum” languages (Latin, English…well, actually, sometimes an “h” in English).
But then, in the Middle Ages, after most letters of our present alphabet had been given more or less “standard” values, it sort of happened again: some European languages palatized the Latin “k” sound to “s” (or, in Italian, “ch”), usually in certain specific contexts – namely, before the letters “i” or “e”.
The answer is “we have C because the Romans did.” Latin had the same redundancy: they used C, K, Q,and X. In otherwords, K[sub]1[/sub], K[sub]2[/sub], Kw, and Ks.
Arguably, Q was a slightly different sound, but they could have written O reks, kuius ekuus kum Klaudio est? (for O rex, cuius equus cum Claudio est?) and survived. So the real question is, once the Romans had invented C from their form of the Greek gamma,* why did they borrow kappa? They only used it for a few words. Why did it stick around? When the English learned to write using the Roman alphabet, why did they adopt the redundancy? The CH spelling doesn’t exist in Old English, so that can’t be it.
*Technically, C is gamma, and G is the invented letter, gamma with an extra stroke, but G took the old sound.
For one thing, all letters are silent. Letters are ink and pixels. Sounds are made by human mouths, tongues and vocal chords. Secondly, those that you single out for being “silent” serve a purpose for reading (i.e., decoding written language). Their purpose isn’t to “make sounds.” It’s to help you recognize the written (silent) symbols as distinct lexical items. They aren’t useless at all.
Indeed, and this gets to the bottom line answer of this question, as you and others have implied in this thread. The “English” alphabet was not designed from the ground up specifically for the English language but instead has a long history behind it of earlier languages and earlier alphabets.
That’s actually the reason why I chose my username…
but what would go wrong if we took them out anyway? It would be unfamiliar, of course, but if it was that way from the beginning, it wouldn’t really matter. Yes there would be a problem with words like that sound a like but are spelled differently, like “weigh” and “way,” but we use them in so many different words that don’t even require them, like “home” or even “sleigh.” There’s no reason for an “e” or an extra “l,” is there?
Sorry, I was going to use “spelling” instead of “sleigh,” but with spelling, you kind of do pronounce that extra “l.”
Ack. Sorry, “sleigh” wasn’t a good example, but you know what I mean…
From what I can gather from Wikipedia, c came into the Etruscan and Roman alphabets from Greek and previously Semitic alphabets as a variant of the “g” sound, such as with the letter gimmel in Hebrew and the letter gamma in Greek. It came to have a modified sound more like a k. At the same time, a variant of c with a tail attached, forming a g, was introduced to represent the g sound.
In Vulgar Latin in the medieval period, the k sound of c became modified to more of a ts sound, especially in French, and then eventually to an s sound (marked with the cedilla under the c). So we got the k sound for c via the Germanic and Old English adaptions of the Roman alphabet, and the s sound for c from French after the Norman conquest.