Cedilla

). The name "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for the letter Z, ceda. An obsolete spelling of "cedilla" is "cerilla" because d and r were sometimes interchangeable in 16th-century Spanish.

ç Ç

Use of the cedilla with the letter C

The most frequent character with cedilla is the ç (c with cedilla). This letter was used for the sound of the affricate ^* in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter z. Spanish has not used it since an orthographic reform in the 18th century.

C-cedilla was adopted for writing other languages. In Romance languages such as French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, some Friulian dialects, and in unofficial Basque, it represents the "soft" sound where c would normally represent the "hard" sound , before a letter which is neither e nor i, or at the end of a word. Modern Portuguese never uses ç at the beginning of a word, but French has some rare words with initial ç, and Catalan uses it at the end of some words, as well ("braç" arm, "falç" sickle) . A well-known word with C-cedilla is "Barça" for "F.C. Barcelona", a common Catalan diminutive of one of Barcelona's football (soccer) teams that is also used by the Spanish-language media.

In French, this diacritic is known as cédille, in Portuguese as cedilha, and in Catalan the C-cedilla is called ce trencada (that is, broken C). In those French comic books that are hand-lettered all in capitals, the cedilla is quickly written as a slash crossing the center of the lower hook of the letter C, at the angle of an acute accent.

In other languages, including Turkish, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Turkmen, Kurdish (at least the Mahabad dialect), and some Friulian dialects, it is used for the affricate sound (the same of English in church). It is also sometimes used in the Romanization of Arabic. In the Turkish alphabet Ç is considered a separate letter, not a variant of C. There are also Ģģ.

A few words are sometimes spelled in English with a ç, almost all of them borrowings from French, for example façade, soupçon and garçon, however it is common to see these words printed without the cedilla (i.e. facade, garcon, etc.). For example, the Oxford English Dictionary uses the spelling "facade" not "façade".

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ^* represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

Use of the cedilla with the letter S

Another use of the cedilla is called the s-cedilla, ş, represents (as in show) in Turkish, Azerbaijan, Tatar, Turkmen, and Kurdish. It is also used in some Romanizations of Arabic, Persian, and Pashto, for the letter .

In the Turkish alphabet, the Ş is also considered a separate letter, not a variant of S.

Use of the cedilla in Latvian

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.

Prospective use of the cedilla with the letter T

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, although it is well known that the letter t in the suffix -tion is not pronounced as a t in either French or English, it has to be distinctly learned that in words such as diplomatie, that letter is pronounced as an s. Firmin-Didot surmised that a new character could be added to French orthography.

Other diacritical marks confused with the cedilla

The Romanian () also represents (as in show) and seemingly resembles the Turkish s cedilla, but the official position is that the Romanian letters actually use a comma (Virgula). Ş/ş and Ţ/ţ are widely used writing Romanian, as are much more widely supported in character sets. The officially correct characters are / and /(may not appear on your browser). In practice, the cedilla form of the character is commonly seen along with the comma form of the character.

The Polish letters "ą" and "ę" are not made with the cedilla, but with the unrelated ogonek mark; superficially an ogonek resembles a reversed cedilla (open to the right instead of the left), but the exact shape is quite different.

External links

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