Looking into Pronunciation of double consonants, turned up an apparent rule for pronouncing a double-C in English that seems to parallel the Italian rule for pronouncing a single C. If the "cc" is followed by a bright vowel ("i" or "e"), it is pronounced /ks/:
accent, occipital, eccentric
Otherwise it is pronounced /k/:
account, occasion, occupy
A dictionary search throws up a few exceptions to this, which mostly appear to be musical loan words from Italian which are still pronounced as the in original ("acciaccatura" for example).
The question is this: how did this rule come about? The parallel with Italian is close enough to make me very suspicious, but I haven't been able to prove a connection between the two.
Best Answer
Forgetting about the "doubling" of the consonant for a second, in English, some consonants, most notably
c
andg
, but alsos
,t
,x
, and the pairsch
andth
are softened when followed by softening vowels (usuallyi
ande
are the softening vowels, buta
andio
softent
,s
, anda
softensx
for example).Now what does it have to do with a double
c
?Let's look at an example:
eccentric
The first
c
is followed by a consonant,c
, so it is pronounced as ak
, while the secondc
is followed by ane
, so it is pronounced as ans
. Putting those together gives aks
sound.On the other hand, in a word like
occasion
, the secondc
is followed by ana
, which doesn't soften thec
. So bothc
s are pronounced ask
's, which is in turn pronounced as a singlek
sound.