A
cedilla () or
cedille is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a
diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation.
Origin
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature
cursive "
z" (zed). The word "cedilla" is the
diminutive of the
Old Spanish name for this letter,
ceda (zeta). Modern Spanish, however, no longer uses this diacritic, although it is still current in
Portuguese,
["cedilla" Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.)] Catalan,
Occitan, and
French, which gives English the alternative spelling of
cedille, from French
cédille. 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" (often typed "facade" due to lack of ç keys on the keyboards of most Anglophone countries).
Use of the cedilla with the letter C
The most frequent character with cedilla is "
ç" ("c" with cedilla, as in
façade). 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" (ʒ), 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 where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound (before "a", "o", "u", or at the end of a word), in
Basque,
Catalan, (occasionally)
English,
French,
Occitan, and
Portuguese.
It represents the
voiceless postalveolar affricate (as in English "
chur
ch") in
Turkish (as in
Çorum),
Albanian,
Friulian,
Kurdish,
Tatar,
Azerbaijani, and
Turkmen language.
In the
International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the
voiceless palatal fricative.
Use of the cedilla with the letter S
The character "ş" represents the
voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in "
show") in several languages:
It is also used in some
Romanizations of
Arabic,
Persian and
Tiberian Hebrew to represent a
pharyngealized "s", although the letter "" is more frequently used for this.
See Tsade.
A proposal for the 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 (but not
diplomatique) and English
action it is pronounced and , respectively (but not in
active in either language). A similar effect occurs with other prefixes or within words also in French and English, such as
partial where
t 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). Romanian professional footballer
Razvan Rat uses a Cedilla on the end of his name to prevent his unfortunate surname being pronounced as "Rat".
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
Several 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 letters ą and ę and
Lithuanian letters ą, ę, į, and ų 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.
