What is Cedilla?

Information about Cedilla

“Cedille” redirects here. For the record label, see Cedille Records.
Çç
Ḑḑ
Ȩȩ
Gg
Ḩḩ
Kk
Ll
Nn
Rr
Ss
Ţt
Diacritical marks
accent
acute accent ( )
double acute accent ( ˝ )
grave accent ( ` )
double grave accent (  ̏ )
breve ( ˘ )
caron / hček ( ˇ )
cedilla ( )
circumflex ( ^ )
diaeresis / umlaut ( )
dot ( )
anunaasika ( ˙ )
anusvara (  ̣ )
chandrabindu (   ँ   ঁ   ઁ   ଁ ఁ )
hook / dấu hỏi (  ̉ )
horn / dấu mc (  ̛ )
macron ( )
ogonek ( ˛ )
ring / kroužek ( ˚, ˳ )
rough breathing / spiritus asper (  ῾ )
smooth breathing / spiritus lenis (  ᾿ )
Marks sometimes used as diacritics
apostrophe ( ’ )
bar ( | )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
hyphen ( ˗ )
tilde ( ~ )
titlo (  ҃ )


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]

Use of the cedilla with the letter C

Main article: ç
The most frequent character with cedilla is "ç" ("c" with cedilla). 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 Catalan, 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.

Use of the cedilla with the letter S

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

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) /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).

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 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.

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. (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".

See also

External links

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
Z
Letters using cedilla sign
ḐḑȨȩĢģḨḩĶķĻļŅņŖŗŞşŢţ
Cedille Records is the independent record label of The Chicago Classical Recording Foundation — a foundation dedicated to preserving Chicago’s rich musical heritage by documenting the work of its finest musicians, ensembles, and composers.
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A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words.
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double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. Consequently, it is also known as Hungarumlaut.[1] The signs formed with diacritic marks count as letters of their own right in the Hungarian alphabet.
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The double grave accent is a diacritic used in scholarly discussions of the Serbo-Croatian language complex and sometimes Slovenian. It is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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The circumflex (ˆ) (often also called a "caret", from a non-diacritical sign with similar shape (^); also "hat" or "uppen") is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Frisian, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Romanized Japanese, Welsh,
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dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct ( · ), or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' (  ̇ ) and 'combining dot below' (  ̣
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Anusvara (Dev: अनुस्वार anusvāra
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Chandrabindu (meaning "moon-dot" in Sanskrit, alternatively spelled candrabindu, chandravindu, candravindu, or chôndrobindu) is a diacritic sign having the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle.
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For other meanings of hook, see hook.


Diacritical marks
accent
acute accent ( )
double acute accent ( ˝ )
grave accent ( ` )

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horn (Vietnamese dấu móc) is a diacritic mark attached to the top right corner of the letters o and u in the Vietnamese alphabet to give ơ and ư, unrounded variants of the vowel represented by the basic letter.
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ogonek (Polish for "little tail", the diminutive of ogon) is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages.
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The spiritus asper ("rough breathing"), dasy pneuma (Greek: dasy, δασύ) or dasia (Greek: δασεῖα), is a diacritical mark used in Polytonic orthography.
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“᾿” redirects here. For the similar character ᾿, see Ejective consonant.


The spiritus lenis ("smooth breathing" or "soft breathing"), psilon pneuma (Greek: psilón, ψιλόν
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apostrophe ( ’  or  ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages written in the Latin alphabet.
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bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others.
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colon (“:”) is a punctuation mark, consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.

Punctuation

Usage

As with many other punctuation marks, the usage of colon varies among languages and, for a given language, among
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For other uses, see Comma.
A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text.
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hyphen ( ‐ ) is a punctuation mark. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. It is often confused with the dashes ( –, —, ― ), which are longer and have different functions.
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tilde (~) is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning a title or superscription, and is pronounced [ˈtɪldə]
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Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol first used in old Cyrillic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek "τίτλος", "title".
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A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words.
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For the indie rock band, see Cursive (band).
Cursive is any style of handwriting which is designed for writing down notes and letters by hand. In the Latin and Cyrillic languages the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke.
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