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The enclitic -que in the words neque and atque can be shortened to produce nec and ac. Are there other instances where -que can turn into -c? Can this be productive, or can it only happen in very special cases? (Bonus question: Are there examples where scansion suggests that -que must be read as -c?)
It seems that ac is only used before consonants in classical Latin, whereas atque, nec and neque could be used anywhere, but this is irrelevant here.
I wrote a longish post attempting a negative answer, and as a last precaution consulted a list of all Latin words ending in -c. One word stuck out to me like a sore thumb, and further research indicates that it may, in fact, be a contraction of -que to -c:
dōnĕc: conj. [shortened from ante- and post-class. form dōnĭcum , from old dative doni (dioni; for root, etc., v. dies) and conj. cum.... —In the Inscr. of Orell. 4370 DONIQVIES is i. q. DONIQUE IS, and donique = donicum
It appears, thus, that at least some authors saw donec as a contraction of donique. This helps with the parsing of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 2: 1116
...ignem ignes procudunt aetheraque aether,
donique ad extremum crescendi perfica finem
omnia perduxit rerum natura creatrix;
Leonard's translation:
...and fires, as on a forge,
Beat out new fire; and ether forges ether;
Till nature, author and ender of the world,
Hath led all things to extreme bound of growth
I will include my other answer, since I believe it otherwise helps shed some light on this:
It appears that this kind of substitution of -c for -que is only present in these two conjunctions:
It is difficult to prove a negative, and I am willing to be corrected, but one fairly convincing inductive line of reasoning would be to choose similar words (i.e. conjunctions with "que") and check if a similar substitution is attested. Here's a list of such words from a brief search:
None of the corresponding pairs (cunc, itac, nanc, sicuc, uc) occurs in a classical corpus, even though some (especially at/ut) seem pretty exact equivalents.
In short: this substitution does not appear to occur in any other words except ac and nec (EDIT) and donec.
