: Constructed Language - spelled like it sounds? Note: This may be more suited to Worldbuilding SE. I believe it belongs here, because it is about how to write a conlang, but if not, please

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You are producing a written work. The look of it matters, as a written document. And a c looks different to a k, and sets off different associations in the mind.

Notably, Latin has no k (it has a hard c, as you are proposing), and very few high-register words in English have a k. It is for this reason that Tolkien, master philologist, chose to represent the k sound in Adûnaic and Khuzdul with a k, but the same sound in Quenya and Sindarin with a c.

In other words, I think your idea is a good one. You are writing for the eye as much as, or more than, the ear. K is harsh to the English eye; c is refined. K is Germanic and low register; c is Latinate and high register.

A short and simple pronunciation note will do the trick: these are hardly unusual in fantasy novels. Some readers will skip it, but this is not a problem: if some readers’ internal voice pronounce some names incorrectly, so be it.

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I think @jm13fire has the right idea: use accents, and give readers a quick pronunciation guide at the beginning.

I would go for a caron over a C, which looks like č, as ç (with a cedilla) is used for a soft C. I would definitely read Ačir as "Akir."

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Your question is based on a faulty connection between "English" letters and Elvish letters and between English sounds and English letters. We use the Latin alphabet to write English words, by a series of approximations where one, two, or more letters represent a single sound. Think of the list of vowels: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. Except vowels aren't letters, they're sounds. Those are the letters we use to represent the sounds. But, for example, the most common vowel in English is shwa, and we don't have a letter for that (instead, almost any 'vowel' letter will be used).

Elvish will be its own language with its own rules. The notion that it doesn't have a "K" but has a k sound is a little odd. Of course it doesn't have a letter K, because it doesn't have any letters from the Latin alphabet. Similarly it doesn't have a C or an S. Make up whatever glyphs you want for whatever kind of writing system you want.

When it comes down to writing it in English, what you are doing is, essentially, transliterating or Romanizing it. In this case you use our alphabet's letters to represent the sounds of the Elvish alphabet. as @what said, it's very similar to how we write Chinese words in English. The word 错 (meaning "wrong, bad") is not spelled with any Latin letters in Chinese, but in Pinyin (a sort of romanization) it's spelled cuò and pronounced like (roughly) tswo. (Pinyin uses c to represent a ts sound).

When devising a romanization, it's common that you'll run out of letters to represent sounds. English certainly has more sounds than it has letters. Consider bath and bathe; there the a represents two different vowels, the th represents one sound, but a different one in each word, and the e serves to silently convert the short A to long A AND to indicate the pronunciation of the th. Tolkien himself struggled with this and decided to use th always for the soft sound (as in bath) and dh for the voiced sound (as in bathe). Since dh doesn't appear in English, normally, the only way a reader can tell how to pronounce that is through a glossary.

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I feel like it's not really the look of the letter k so much as it is the sound. I feel like a good workaround here would be to use the sound produced by K as little as possible. To use your example, I feel that Acir (ah-SEER) is more of a soft and "Elvish"-sounding name. I think that instead of there being no letter k, the sound 'kh' should be essentially removed.

There is a reason to leave the letter in the language, and that is for words foreign to the Elvish language. For example, in Spanish, the letters W and K are not native to the language and not used in any native words, but are kept for two reasons: because Spanish uses the Latin alphabet, and because they are used in foreign words such as el wat which refers to the unit of electrical measure (the watt).

EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that my solution above would require a lot of rewriting. In response to this, I say the following:

I agree that using c instead of k makes the language look much smoother. However, using c to produce only the k sound is rather deceptive. It would be helpful, then, to use a glossary.

Personally, I feel that the letter c looks much "smoother" than the letter s, especially in the construction ce as in ice. Possibly you could use some sort of symbol (accent, umlaut, caret etc) to symbolize the pronunciation differences if you decide to allow c to use both pronunciations.

Regardless, I suggest a glossary. This will allow you to include words in the elven vernacular and define them so readers are not confused (see also: Eragon/Inheritance series).

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