oh nice.

So words like believe and ceiling have the same sound, but the spelling isn't.

In this context, what does a c mean?

Oh and more on the great vowel shift in English, or should I say Norman Franglish?

The Middle English language evolved from Old English after the Norman conquest, adding many loanwords from Norman French, whose sounds and spellings changed and were changed by the older English customs. In French loanwords, the digraph <ie> generally represented the sound [eː], while <ei> represented [ɛː]; <ie> was later extended to signify [eː] in non-French words. In the Great Vowel Shift, sounds [eː] and [ɛː] were raised to [iː] and [eː] respectively. Later, the meet–meat merger saw the vowel in many [eː] words change to [iː], so that meat became a homonym of meet, while conceive now rhymed with believe.[6][7] Early Modern English spelling was not fixed; many words were spelled with <ie> and <ei> interchangeably, in printed works of the seventeenth century and private correspondence of educated people into the nineteenth century.

LOL at Wikipedia