Cedilla
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Diacritical marks |
|---|
|
accent
breve ( ˘ )
hook / dấu hỏi ( ̉ ) |
| Marks sometimes used as diacritics |
|
apostrophe ( ’ ) |
A cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail is the bottom half of a miniature cursive z. 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.[1]
Contents |
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 [ts] 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 /s/ where c would normally represent the "hard" sound /k/, 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 occasionally has an initial ç (ça that),[2] and Catalan uses it at the beginning of two rare words (ça that, ço this) and at the end of a number of 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 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 [tʃ] (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.).
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [ç] represents the voiceless palatal fricative.
Use of the cedilla with the letter S
Another use of the cedilla is called the s-cedilla, ş, which represents /ʃ/ (as in show) in Romanian, Turkish, Azerbaijan, Tatar, Turkmen, and Kurdish. It is also used in some Romanizations of Arabic, Persian, and Pashto, for the letter ṣād.
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 usually not pronounced as (or close to) /t/ in either French or English, it has to be distinctly learned that in words such as the French diplomatie and the English action, that letter is pronounced as /s/ and /ʃ/, respectively. Firmin-Didot surmised that a new character could be added to French orthography.
A similar letter does exist in Romanian representing /ts/ (see below).
Other diacritical marks confused with the cedilla
The Romanian Ș (ș) also represents /ʃ/ (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 Ș/ș and Ț/ț (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.
Notes
- ^
(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 printers' name for that, 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". - ^ The French Academy online dictionary also gives çà and çûdra.
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
See also
