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Cedilla
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ç | ç |
| Ḉ | ḉ |
| Ḑ | ḑ |
| Ȩ | ȩ |
| Ḝ | ḝ |
| Ģ | ģ |
| Ḩ | ḩ |
| Ķ | ķ |
| Ļ | ļ |
| Ņ | ņ |
| Ŗ | ŗ |
| Ş | ş |
| Ţ | ţ |
| Diacritical marks |
|
accent
breve ( ˘ )
hook / dấu hỏi ( ̉ ) |
| Marks sometimes used as diacritics |
|
apostrophe ( ’ ) |
A cedilla (pronounced /sɪˈdɪlə/) is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail originated as the bottom half of a miniature cursive "z". The word "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for this letter, ceda, where it was first used. Modern Spanish, however, no longer uses this diacritic. An obsolete spelling of cedilla is cerilla.[1]
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The most frequent character with cedilla is "ç" ("c" with cedilla, as in façade). It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter "z".
It represents the "soft" sound /s/ where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound /k/ (before "a", "o", "u", or at the end of a word), in Basque, Catalan, English, French, Occitan, and Portuguese language.
It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/ (as in English "church") in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Friulian, Kurdish, Tatar, Turkish, and Turkmen language.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /ç/ represents the voiceless palatal fricative.
The symbol "ş" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in "show") in several languages:
- Azerbaijani
- Crimean Tatar
- Gagauz
- Kurdish
- Tatar
- Turkish (It is included as a separate letter in the Turkish alphabet.)
- Turkmen
For example, it is used in Turkish words or names like Eskişehir, Şımarık, Hakan Şükür, Hasan Şaş, Rüştü Reçber etc.
It is also used in some Romanizations of Arabic, Persian, Pashto and Tiberian Hebrew to represent a pharyngealized "s", although the letter "ṣ" is more frequently used for this. See Tsade.
- In HTML character entity references
Şandşcan be used.
In 1868, Ambroise Firmin-Didot suggested in his book Observations sur l'orthographe, ou ortografie, française (Observations on French Spelling) that French phonetics could be better regularized by adding a cedilla beneath the letter "t" in some words. For example, it is well-known that in the suffix -tion this letter is usually not pronounced as (or close to) /t/ in either French or English. It has to be distinctly learned that in words such as French diplomatie and English action it is pronounced /s/ and /ʃ/, respectively. Firmin-Didot surmised that a new character could be added to French orthography. A similar letter does exist in Romanian (see below).
In Latvian, the cedilla is used on the letters "ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ", and historically also "ŗ", to indicate palatalization. Because the lowercase letter "g" has a descender, the cedilla is rotated 180° and placed over the letter. The uppercase equivalent "Ģ" has a normal cedilla. However, from the typographical point of view, these diacritics are commas.
Many languages add a diacritical comma (virgula) to various letters, such as ș, ģ, and ķ. These marks resemble cedillas, and some sources consider them to be cedillas, but they are officially considered commas. This is particularly confusing for characters which can adopt both diacritics: for example, the consonant /ʃ/ is written as ş in Turkish but ș in Romanian, and Romanian writers will sometimes use the former instead of the latter because of insufficient font or character-set support.
The Polish and Lithuanian letters "ą" and "ę" are not made with the cedilla, but with the unrelated ogonek diacritic; superficially, an ogonek resembles a reversed cedilla (opening to the right instead of the left), but the exact shape is quite different.
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(1) For cedilla being the diminutive of ceda, see definition of cedilla, Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd edition, Real Academia Española. (Spanish) Can be seen in context by accessing the site of the Real Academia and searching for cedilla. Accessed 27 July 2006.
(2) Definition of cedilla in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1970 edition, vol. 2, p. 208 mentions former obscure spelling cerilla, gives it as a diminutive of zēta, mentions only use under the letter "c" in French, Portuguese, and (formerly) Spanish. Earliest cited use is a 1599 Spanish grammar; a 1753 citation shows the entire character "ç" ("c" with cedilla) referred to as "cedilla", a usage it says still has some currency with printers; it also documents another name used by printers, "ceceril".
(3) Etymology of cerilla in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 edition, accessed online in 2006, says it originated in Spain "due to interchange of d and r".
- Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
- Keyboard Help — Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer
| The ISO basic Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
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Letters using cedilla sign
ÇçḐḑȨȩĢģḨḩĶķĻļŅņŖŗŞşŢţ
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters
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