Cedilla

"Cedille" redirects here. For the record label, seeCedille Records.

Not to be confused withSedilia.

For the similar looking diacritics, seeOgonekandDiacritical comma.

Acedilla(/sɪˈdɪlə/sih-DIH-lə;fromSpanishcedilla,"smallceda",i.e. small" z "), orcedille(from Frenchcédille,pronounced[sedij]), is a hook or tail (¸) added under certain letters (as adiacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modified. InCatalan(where it is calledtrenc),French,andPortuguese(where it is called acedilha) it is used only under the letter⟨c⟩(to form⟨ç⟩), and the entire letter is called, respectively,c trencada(i.e. "broken C" ),c cédille,andc cedilhado(orc cedilha,colloquially). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages ofSub-Saharan Africa,includingVutefromCameroon.

◌̧
Cedilla
U+0327◌̧COMBINING CEDILLA(diacritic)
See also
U+00B8¸CEDILLA(symbol)

This diacritic is not to be confused with theogonek(◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to thediacrital comma,which is used in the Romanian andLatvian alphabet,and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.

Origin

Origin of the cedilla from theVisigothicz

A conventional "ç" and 'modernist' cedilla "c̦" (right). (Helvetica and Akzidenz-Grotesk Book)

The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniaturecursivez.The wordcedillais thediminutiveof theOld Spanishname for this letter,ceda(zeta).Modern Spanish and isolationist Galician no longer use this diacritic, although it is used inReintegrationist Galician,Portuguese,Catalan,Occitan,andFrench,which givesEnglishthe alternative spellings ofcedille,fromFrench"cédille",and thePortugueseformcedilha.An obsolete spelling ofcedillaiscerilla.The earliest use in English cited by theOxford English Dictionaryis a 1599 Spanish-English dictionary and grammar.Chambers'Cyclopædiais cited for the printer-trade variantcecerilin use in 1738.Its use in English is not universal and applies to loan words fromFrenchandPortuguesesuch asfaçade,limaçonandcachaça(often typedfacade,limaconandcachacabecause of lack ofçkeys on English-language keyboards).

With the advent oftypeface modernism,the calligraphic nature of the cedilla was thought somewhat jarring onsans-seriftypefaces, 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 thediacritical comma.

C

Main article:Ç

The most frequent character with cedilla is "ç" ( "c" with cedilla, as infaçade). It was first used for the sound of thevoiceless alveolar affricate/ts/in old Spanish and stems from the letter⟨ꝣ⟩(theVisigothicform 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/s/,thevoiceless alveolar sibilant,where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound/k/(before "a", "o", "u", or at the end of a word) in English and in certain Romance languages such asCatalan,Galician,French(where ç appears in the name of the language itself,français),Ligurian,Occitan,andPortuguese.In Occitan, Friulian, and Catalan,çcan also be found at the beginning of a word (Çubran,ço) or at the end (braç).

It represents thevoiceless postalveolar affricate/tʃ/(as in English "church") inAlbanian,Azerbaijani,Crimean Tatar,Friulian,Kurdish,Tatar,Turkish(as inçiçek,çam,çekirdek,Çorum), andTurkmen.It is also sometimes used this way inManx,to distinguish it from thevelar fricative.

In theInternational Phonetic Alphabet,⟨ç⟩ represents thevoiceless palatal fricative.

S

Main article:Ş

The character "ş" represents thevoiceless postalveolar fricative/ʃ/(as in "show ") in several languages, including many belonging to theTurkic languages,and included as a separate letter in their alphabets:

• Turkish
• Azerbaijani
• Crimean Tatar
• Gagauz
• Tatar
• Turkmen
• Romanian(substitution use whenS-comma[Ș] was missing from pre-3.0Unicodestandards, and older standards, still frequent, but an error)
• Kurdish

InHTML character entity referencesŞandşcan be used.

T

Main article:Ţ

Gagauzuses Ţ (T with cedilla), one of the few languages to do so, and Ş (S with cedilla). Besides being present in some Gagauz orthographies, T with Cedilla also exists in theGeneral Alphabet of Cameroon Languages,in theKabylelanguage, in theManjakandMankanyalanguages, and possibly elsewhere.

In 1868, Ambroise Firmin-Didot suggested in his bookObservations 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, the suffix-tionis usually not pronounced as/tjɔ̃/but as/sjɔ̃/.It has to be distinctly learned that in words such asdiplomatie(but notdiplomatique), it is pronounced/s/.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 with the same description,T-cedilla(majuscule: Ţ, minuscule: ţ), is used inGagauz.A similar letter, theT-comma(majuscule: Ț, minuscule: ț), exists in Romanian, but it has a comma accent, not a cedilla.

Languages with other characters with cedillas

Latvian

Comparatively, some consider the diacritics on thepalatalizedLatvian consonants "ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ", and formerly "ŗ" to be cedillas. Although their Adobe glyph names arecommas,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

InMarshallese orthography,four letters inMarshallesehave cedillas:⟨ļ m̧ ņ o̧⟩.In standard printed text they arealwayscedillas, and their omission or the substitution ofcomma belowanddot belowdiacritics are nonstandard.

As of 2011,many font rendering engines do not displayanyof these properly, for two reasons:

• "ļ"and"ņ"usually do not display properly at all, because of theuse 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 ofLatvian orthography.This is considered nonstandard in Marshallese. The use of azero-width non-joinerbetween 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 thecombiningcedilla diacritic. Most Unicode fonts issued withWindowsdo not display combining diacritics properly, showing them too far to the right of the letter, as withTahoma( "m̧"and"o̧") andTimes New Roman( "m̧"and"o̧"). This mostly affects"m̧",and may or may not affect"o̧".But some common Unicode fonts likeArial Unicode MS( "m̧"and"o̧"),Cambria( "m̧"and"o̧") andLucida Sans Unicode( "m̧"and"o̧") 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.

Because of these font display issues, it is not uncommon to find nonstandardad hocsubstitutes for these letters. The online version of the Marshallese-English Dictionary (the only complete Marshallese dictionary in existence)displays the letters with dot below diacritics, all of which do exist as precombined glyphs in Unicode: "ḷ","ṃ","ṇ"and"ọ".The first three exist in theInternational Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration,and "ọ"exists in theVietnamese alphabet,and both of these systems are supported by the most recent versions of common fonts likeArial,Courier New,Tahoma andTimes New Roman.This sidesteps most of the Marshallese text display issues associated with the cedilla, but is still inappropriate for polished standard text.

Vute

Vute,aMambiloidlanguage fromCameroon,uses cedilla for the nasalization of all vowel qualities (cf. theogonekused inPolishandNavajofor the same purpose). This includes unconventional Roman letters that are formalized from theIPAinto the official writing system. These include <i̧ ȩ ɨ̧ ə̧ a̧ u̧ o̧ ɔ̧>.

Hebrew

TheISO 259romanization ofBiblical Hebrewuses Ȩ (E with cedilla) and Ḝ (E with cedilla and breve).

Diacritical comma

Languages such asRomanian,LatvianandLivonianadd a comma (virgula) to some letters, such asș,which looks somewhat like a cedilla, but is more precisely adiacritical comma.This is particularly confusing with letters which can take either diacritic: for example, the consonant/ʃ/is written as "ş" inTurkishbut as "ș" in Romanian, and Romanian writers will sometimes use the former instead of the latter because of insufficient computer support.

Adobenames of the Latvian letters ("ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ",and formerly"ŗ") use the word "comma", but in theUnicodeStandard they are named "g", "k", "l", "n", and "r" withcedilla.The letters were introduced to theUnicodestandard before 1992, and their names cannot be altered. Influenced by Latvian, Livonian has the same problem for "d̦", "ļ", "ņ", "ŗ" and "ț". ThePolishletters"ą"and"ę"andLithuanianletters"ą", "ę", "į",and"ų"are not made with the cedilla either, but with the unrelatedogonekdiacritic.

Unicode

Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with cedilla" (so called, as explained above) asprecomposed charactersand these are displayed below. In addition, many more symbols may be composed using thecombining characterfacility (U+0327◌̧COMBINING CEDILLAandU+0326◌̦COMBINING COMMA BELOW) that may be used with any letter or other diacritic to create a customised symbol but this does not mean that the result has any real-world application and are not shown in the table.

• Cedilla◌̧
  Latin:Ç ç
• Ḉ ḉ
• Ḑ ḑ
• Ȩ ȩ
• Ḝ ḝ
• Ģ ģ
• Ḩ ḩ
• Ķ ķ
• Ļ ļ
• Ņ ņ
• Ŗ ŗ
• Ş ş
• Ţ ţ

In ambiguous cases,typeface designersmust choose whether to use a cedilla diacritic or comma-below diacritic for thesecodepoints,leaving it to others to provide the user with a method to achieve the other form (i.e., that relies on the combining character method). Here are three popular faces that demonstrate the choices made:

• Arial: Ç ç Ḉ ḉ Ḑ ḑ Ȩ ȩ Ḝ ḝ Ģ ģ Ḩ ḩ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ Ņ ņ Ŗ ŗ Ş ş Ţ ţ
• Times New Roman: Ç ç Ḉ ḉ Ḑ ḑ Ȩ ȩ Ḝ ḝ Ģ ģ Ḩ ḩ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ Ņ ņ Ŗ ŗ Ş ş Ţ ţ
• Courier New: Ç ç Ḉ ḉ Ḑ ḑ Ȩ ȩ Ḝ ḝ Ģ ģ Ḩ ḩ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ Ņ ņ Ŗ ŗ Ş ş Ţ ţ

In each case, the diacritic displayed with D, G, K, L N and R is a comma-below; in the other cases it is displayed as a cedilla. It may be that computer fonts are sold in the Romanian and Turkish markets that favour the national standard form of this diacritic.

External links

• ScriptSource—Positioning the traditional cedilla
• Diacritics Project—All you need to design a font with correct accents
• Keyboard Help—Learn how to make world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer