Cedilla
A cedilla, also known as cedilha or cédille, is a hook or tail added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese, it is used only under the c, and the entire letter is called, respectively, c trencada, c cédille, and c cedilhado. It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute from Cameroon.
Origin
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature cursive z. The word "cedilla" is the diminutive of the Old Spanish name for this letter, ceda. Modern Spanish and Galician no longer use this diacritic, although it is used in Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, and French, which gives English the alternative spellings of cedille, from French "cédille", and the Portuguese form cedilha. An obsolete spelling of cedilla is cerilla. The earliest use in English cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1599 Spanish-English dictionary and grammar. Chambers’ Cyclopædia is cited for the printer-trade variant ceceril in use in 1738. The main use in English is not universal and applies to loan words from French and Portuguese such as "façade", "limaçon" and "cachaça".With the advent of modernism, the calligraphic nature of the cedilla was thought somewhat jarring on sans-serif typefaces, and so some designers instead substituted a comma design, which could be made bolder and more compatible with the style of the text. This reduces the visual distinction between the cedilla and the diacritical comma.
C
The most frequent character with cedilla is "ç". It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter "z", whose upper loop was lengthened and reinterpreted as a "c", whereas its lower loop became the diminished appendage, the cedilla.It represents the "soft" sound, the voiceless alveolar sibilant, where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound in English and in certain Romance languages such as Catalan, Galician, French, Ligurian, Occitan, and Portuguese. In Occitan, Friulian and Catalan ç can also be found at the beginning of a word or at the end.
It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Friulian, Kurdish, Tatar, Turkish, and Turkmen. It is also sometimes used this way in Manx, to distinguish it from the velar fricative.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨ç⟩ represents the voiceless palatal fricative.
S
The character "ş" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative in several languages, including many belonging to the Turkic languages, and included as a separate letter in their alphabets:- Turkish
- * For example, it is used in Turkish words and names like Eskişehir, Şımarık, Hasan Şaş, Rüştü Reçber etc.
- Azerbaijani
- Crimean Tatar
- Gagauz
- Tatar
- Turkmen
- Romanian
- Kurdish
Ş and ş can be used.Languages with other characters with cedillas
Latvian
Comparatively, some consider the diacritics on the palatalized Latvian consonants "ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ", and formerly "ŗ" to be cedillas. Although their Adobe glyph names are commas, their names in the Unicode Standard are "g", "k", "l", "n", and "r" with a cedilla. The letters were introduced to the Unicode standard before 1992, and their names cannot be altered. The uppercase equivalent "Ģ" sometimes has a regular cedilla.Marshallese
In Marshallese orthography, four letters in Marshallese have cedillas: <ļ m̧ ņ o̧>. In standard printed text they are always cedillas, and their omission or the substitution of comma below and dot below diacritics are nonstandard., many font rendering engines do not display any of these properly, for two reasons:
- "ļ" and "ņ" usually do not display properly at all, because of the [|use of the cedilla in Latvian]. Unicode has precombined glyphs for these letters, but most quality fonts display them with comma below diacritics to accommodate the expectations of Latvian orthography. This is considered nonstandard in Marshallese. The use of a zero-width non-joiner between the letter and the diacritic can alleviate this problem: "ļ" and "ņ" may display properly, but may not; see below.
- "m̧" and "o̧" do not currently exist in Unicode as precombined glyphs, and must be encoded as the plain Latin letters "m" and "o" with the combining cedilla diacritic. Most Unicode fonts issued with Windows do not display combining diacritics properly, showing them too far to the right of the letter, as with Tahoma and Times New Roman. This mostly affects "m̧", and may or may not affect "o̧". But some common Unicode fonts like Arial Unicode MS, Cambria and Lucida Sans Unicode do not have this problem. When "m̧" is properly displayed, the cedilla is either underneath the center of the letter, or is underneath the right-most leg of the letter, but is always directly underneath the letter wherever it is positioned.
French
In 1868, Ambroise Firmin-Didot suggested in his book Observations sur l'orthographe, ou ortografie, française that French phonetics could be better regularized by adding a cedilla beneath the letter "t" in some words. For example, the suffix -tion this letter is usually not pronounced as in French, but as. It has to be distinctly learned that in words such as diplomatie it is pronounced. A similar effect occurs with other prefixes or within words. Firmin-Didot surmised that a new character could be added to French orthography. A letter of the same description T-cedilla is used in Gagauz. A similar letter, the T-comma, does exist in Romanian, but it has a comma accent, not a cedilla.Romanian
The Unicode characters for Ţ and Ş were wrongly implemented in Windows-1250, the code page for Romanian. In Windows 7, Microsoft corrected the error by replacing T-cedilla with T-comma and S-cedilla with S-comma.Vute
, a Mambiloid language from Cameroon, uses cedilla for the nasalization of all vowel qualities. This includes unconventional roman letters that are formalized from the IPA into the official writing system. These include <i̧ ȩ ɨ̧ ə̧ a̧ u̧ o̧ ɔ̧>.Gagauz
uses Ţ, one of the few languages to do so, and Ş. Besides being present in some Gagauz orthographies, T with Cedilla exists as part of the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, in the Kabyle dialect of the Berber language, in the Manjak and Mankanya languages, and possibly elsewhere.Hebrew
The ISO 259 romanization of Biblical Hebrew uses Ȩ and Ḝ.Similar diacritics
Languages such as Romanian add a comma to some letters, such as ș, which looks like a cedilla, but is more precisely a diacritical comma. This is particularly confusing with letters which can take either diacritic: for example, the consonant 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 letters "ą" and "ę" and Lithuanian letters "ą", "ę", "į", and "ų" are not made with the cedilla either, but with the unrelated ogonek diacritic.
Encodings
provides precomposed characters for some Latin letters with cedillas. Others can be formed using the cedilla combining character.| Description | Letter | Unicode | HTML |
| Cedilla | ¸ | U+00B8 | ¸ or ¸ |
| Combining cedilla | ◌̧ | U+0327 | ̧ |
| C with cedilla | Ç ç | U+00C7 U+00E7 | Ç or Ç ç or ç |
| C with cedilla and acute accent | Ḉ ḉ | U+1E08 U+1E09 | Ḉ ḉ |
| Combining small c with cedilla | ◌ᷗ | U+1DD7 | ᷗ |
| D with cedilla | Ḑ ḑ | U+1E10 U+1E11 | Ḑ ḑ |
| E with cedilla | Ȩ ȩ | U+0228 U+0229 | Ȩ ȩ |
| E with cedilla and breve | Ḝ ḝ | U+1E1C U+1E1D | Ḝ ḝ |
| G with cedilla | Ģ ģ | U+0122 U+0123 | Ģ ģ |
| H with cedilla | Ḩ ḩ | U+1E28 U+1E29 | Ḩ ḩ |
| K with cedilla | Ķ ķ | U+0136 U+0137 | Ķ ķ |
| L with cedilla | Ļ ļ | U+013B U+013C | Ļ ļ |
| N with cedilla | Ņ ņ | U+0145 U+0146 | Ņ ņ |
| R with cedilla | Ŗ ŗ | U+0156 U+0157 | Ŗ ŗ |
| S with cedilla | Ş ş | U+015E U+015F | Ş ş |
| T with cedilla | Ţ ţ | U+0162 U+0163 | Ţ ţ |