[ncpa-cpl]

> sometimes it makes a soft c sound where a hard one is expected (e.g. facade).

Just adding, in the case of Facade, is very similar to the french façade.

So I guess the ç cedille was lost in translation. French uses the ç to make the ça and ço syllables change from /k/ to /s/.

[trealira]

Yes, you're right. It used to be more common to write it with the cedilla/cedille, but over time it's become more common to write it as a normal c. Similarly, for the phrase "deja vu", it used to be more common to write it with the accent marks (déjà-vu), whereas I usually see it written now as deja vu. And I see same thing with café being written as cafe.

[WorldMaker]

English in general seems to "abhor" accent marks and they are seen as "style" rather than orthography/punctuation. It's interesting because it came up recently that the New York Times had to apologize that their style guide required the removal of all accent marks and that drastically changed the meaning of a bunch of Vietnamese names and words they printed in an article (insultingly so).

One of the few notorious style guides the other way, for instance, is the more "upper-crust" New Yorker requires a diaresis mark in words such as "coöperation" (which is useful when discussing say a "chicken coop" versus a "chicken coöp" versus a "chicken coup", all things with very different meanings). To a lot of Americans diaresis marks look unnatural and that becomes one of the sillier markers that the New Yorker is "upper-crust" and "fancy", but teachers for decades have thought they would be a great addition to the language if adopted more widely.