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Ç	ç
Ģ	ģ
Ķ	ķ
Ļ	ļ
Ņ	ņ
Ŗ	ŗ
Ş	ş
Ţ	ţ

A 'cedilla' 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]

Contents

Use of the cedilla with the letter ''C''

Use of the cedilla with the letter ''S''

Prospective use of the cedilla with the letter ''T''

Use of the cedilla in Latvian

Other diacritical marks confused with the cedilla

Technical Notes

References

See also

External links

Use of the cedilla with the letter ''C''

Main articles: ç

The most frequent character with cedilla is "ç" ("c" with cedilla). 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".
It represents the "soft" sound where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound (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 (as in English "church") in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Friulian, Kurdish, Tatar, Turkish, and Turkmen language.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

Use of the cedilla with the letter ''S''

The symbol "ş" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in "show") in several languages:

★ Azerbaijani

★ Crimean Tatar

★ 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 "" is more frequently used for this. See Tsade.

★ In HTML character entity references Ş and ş can be used.

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, it is well-known that in the suffix ''-tion'' this letter is usually not pronounced as (or close to) in either French or English. It has to be distinctly learned that in words such as French ''diplomatie'' and English ''action'' it is pronounced and , respectively. Firmin-Didot surmised that a new character could be added to French orthography. A similar letter does exist in Romanian (see below).

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. However, from the typographical point of view, these diacritics are commas.

Other diacritical marks confused with the cedilla

Many languages add a diacritical comma (''virgula'') to various letters, such as , ''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 is written as ''ş'' in Turkish but 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.

Technical Notes

The ISO-8859-1 and extended ASCII character encodings include the letters ç, ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, ŗ, ş, ţ, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the cedilla accent are available in Unicode.
On Windows computers, letters with cedilla accents can be created by holding down the alt key and typing in a three-number code on the number pad to the right of the keyboard before releasing the alt key; ç is 135.

References

1.
(1) For ''cedilla'' being the diminutive of ''ceda'', see definition of ''cedilla'', ''Diccionario de la lengua española'', 22nd edition, Real Academia Española. 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".

See also

★ S-comma

★ T-comma

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