A
cedilla or
cedille is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a
diacritical markA diacritic is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective...
to modify their pronunciation.
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature
cursiveCursive is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke...
"
zZ is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta . In American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form...
" (zed). The word "cedilla" is the
diminutiveIn language structure, a diminutive, or diminutive form, is a formation of a word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning, smallness of the object or quality named, encapsulation, intimacy, or endearment...
of the
Old SpanishThe language known today as Spanish is derived from a dialect of spoken Latin that developed in the north-central part of the Iberian Peninsula in what is now northern Spain...
name for this letter,
cedaZeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Zayin...
(zeta). Modern Spanish, however, no longer uses this diacritic, although it is still current in
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago...
CatalanCatalan is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencià , as well as in the city of Alghero on the Italian island of...
and
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
, which gives English the alternative spelling of
cedille, from French
cédille.
| Ç is a letter of Albanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar, Ligurian, Kurdish and Zazaki. This letter also appears in Portuguese, French, Occitan, Catalan, and Friulian language as a variant of letter “c”....
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ĢG is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee.-History:The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar from voiceless...
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ĶK is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay.-History and usage:...
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ķ |
ĻŁ or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni and Dogrib alphabets, and of several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language...
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ļ |
ŅN is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en.- Usage :N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages,...
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ŖR is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ar; its name in Hiberno-English is or .-History:...
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ŗ |
ŞS is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.- Usage :...
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ş |
ŢT is the twentieth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled tee. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :...
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ţ |
A
cedilla or
cedille is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a
diacritical markA diacritic is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective...
to modify their pronunciation.
Origin
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature
cursiveCursive is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke...
"
zZ is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta . In American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form...
" (zed). The word "cedilla" is the
diminutiveIn language structure, a diminutive, or diminutive form, is a formation of a word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning, smallness of the object or quality named, encapsulation, intimacy, or endearment...
of the
Old SpanishThe language known today as Spanish is derived from a dialect of spoken Latin that developed in the north-central part of the Iberian Peninsula in what is now northern Spain...
name for this letter,
cedaZeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Zayin...
(zeta). Modern Spanish, however, no longer uses this diacritic, although it is still current in
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago...
CatalanCatalan is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencià , as well as in the city of Alghero on the Italian island of...
and
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
, 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 DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language...
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 "
çis a letter of Albanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar, Ligurian, Kurdish and Zazaki. This letter also appears in Portuguese, French, Occitan, Catalan, and Friulian language as a variant of letter “c”....
" ("c" with cedilla, as in
façade). It was first used for the sound of the
voiceless alveolar affricateThe voiceless alveolar affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ts. The voiceless alveolar affricate occurs in such languages as German, Latvian,...
in old Spanish and stems from the
VisigothicVisigothic script was a type of medieval script that originated in the Visigothic kingdom in Hispania...
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
BasqueBasque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is the mother tongue of approximately one fifth of Basques, 632,000 out of nearly 3,000,000...
,
CatalanCatalan is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencià , as well as in the city of Alghero on the Italian island of...
, (occasionally)
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
,
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
,
OccitanOccitan , known also as Lenga d'òc in Occitan or Langue d'oc in French is a Romance language spoken in Occitania, that is, Southern France, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, Monaco and in the Aran Valley of Spain...
, and
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago...
.
It represents the
voiceless postalveolar affricateThe voiceless palato-alveolar affricate or domed postalveolar affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the "ch" sound in "chip"....
(as in English "
chur
ch") in
TurkishTurkish is spoken as a first language by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other...
(as in
ÇorumÇorum is a landlocked northern Anatolian city that is the capital of the Çorum Province of Turkey. Çorum is located inland in the central Black Sea Region of Turkey, and is approximately from Ankara and from Istanbul...
),
AlbanianAlbanian is a unique Indo-European language spoken by nearly 6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Serbia. Albanian is also spoken by native enclaves...
,
FriulianFriulian , more properly Friulan in English, is a Romance language belonging to the Rhaetian family, spoken in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. Friulian has around 800,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom also speak Italian...
,
KurdishKurdish is the language spoken by Kurds in western Asia. Unlike many other languages it does not have a single standardized linguistic entity with the status of an official or state language...
,
TatarThe Tatar language is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars.-Geographic distribution:Tatar is spoken in Russia , Central Asia, Ukraine, Poland, China, Finland and Turkey....
,
AzerbaijaniAzerbaijani is a language belonging to the Turkic language family, spoken in southwestern Asia, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran...
, and
Turkmen languageTurkmen is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 380,000 in northwestern Afghanistan and 500,000 in northeastern Iran.- Classification, related languages and dialects :Turkmen is in the...
.
In the
International Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet
["The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...]
, represents the
voiceless palatal fricativeThe voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C...
.
Use of the cedilla with the letter S
The character "ş" represents the
voiceless postalveolar fricativeThe voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages....
(as in "
show") in several languages:
- Turkish
Turkish is spoken as a first language by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other...
(It is included as a separate letter (Ş) in the Turkish alphabetThe Turkish alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, a certain number of which have been adapted or modified for the phonetic requirements of the language.These letters are:...
.)
- For example, it is used in Turkish words and names like Eskişehir
Eskişehir is a city in northwestern Turkey and the capital of the Eskişehir Province. According to the 2008 census, the population of the district was 614,247; of which 599,796 live in the city of Eskişehir. The city is located on the banks of the Porsuk River, 792 m above sea level, where it...
, Şımarık"Şımarık" is a 1997 song by Tarkan. Its lyrics were written by Sezen Aksu, with music credited as composed by Aksu, Tarkan and Ozan Çolakoğlu at the time. However, Tarkan later admitted in a 2006 interview that this had been done without Aksu's consent, who was the true copyright owner...
, Hakan ŞükürHakan Şükür , is a former Turkish footballer who played as a striker. He is one of the most prolific strikers of the modern era, scoring 383 goals in his career....
, Hasan ŞaşHasan Gökhan Şaş is a former Turkish international football player.The Turkish winger began his career with a bang at club side Ankaragücü in 1995, scoring nearly at will for the unfashionable club. Domestic giants Galatasaray soon took a shine to the prolific young player's considerable talents...
, Rüştü ReçberRüştü Reçber is a Turkish football goalkeeper who currently plays for Besiktas S.K.Rüştü is a Turkish football icon and his country's record international cap-holder...
etc.
- Kurdish
Kurdish is the language spoken by Kurds in western Asia. Unlike many other languages it does not have a single standardized linguistic entity with the status of an official or state language...
- Zazaki
- Azerbaijani
Azerbaijani is a language belonging to the Turkic language family, spoken in southwestern Asia, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran...
- Crimean Tatar
The Crimean Tatar language , also known as Crimean and Crimean Turkish is the language of the Crimean Tatars. It is spoken in Crimea, Central Asia , and the Crimean Tatar diasporas in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria...
- Gagauz
The Gagauz language is a Turkic language, spoken by the Gagauz people, and the official language of Gagauzia, Republic of Moldova. It is spoken by approximately 150,000 people. There are two dialects, Bulgar Gagauzi and Maritime Gagauzi. This is a different language from Balkan Gagauz Turkish...
- Tatar
The Tatar language is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars.-Geographic distribution:Tatar is spoken in Russia , Central Asia, Ukraine, Poland, China, Finland and Turkey....
- Turkmen
Turkmen is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 380,000 in northwestern Afghanistan and 500,000 in northeastern Iran.- Classification, related languages and dialects :Turkmen is in the...
It is also used in some
RomanizationIn linguistics, romanization or latinization, alternately spelt as latinisation or romanisation , is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system...
s of
ArabicArabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. In terms of speakers, the Arabic macrolanguage is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as...
,
PersianPersian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq and Bahrain, and has a status of official language in the first three countries under different names...
and Tiberian Hebrew to represent a pharyngealized "s", although the letter "" is more frequently used for this.
See TsadeTsade is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Tsadi and Arabic ' . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects...
.
- In HTML character entity references
Ş and ş can be used.
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 letterT-comma is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the Romanian language sound , the voiceless alveolar affricate...
does exist in Romanian (see below). Romanian professional footballer
Razvan RatRăzvan Dincă Raţ is an Romanian footballer who currently plays as a left back for Ukrainian Premier League club Shakhtar Donetsk and the Romanian national team....
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
LatvianLatvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
, the cedilla is used on the letters "ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ", and historically also "ŗ", to indicate
palatalizationPalatalization or palatalisation generally refers to two phenomena:*As a process or the result of a process, the effect that front vowels and the palatal approximant frequently have on consonants;...
. Because the lowercase letter "g" has a
descenderIn typography, a descender is the portion of a letter in a Latin alphabet that extends below the baseline of a font.For example, in the letter y, the descender would be the "tail," or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two lines converging...
, 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 TurkishTurkish is spoken as a first language by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other...
but in RomanianRomanian or Daco-Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Republic of Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia...
, and Romanian writers will sometimes use the former instead of the latter because of insufficient font or character-set support.
The PolishPolish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions...
letters ą and ę and LithuanianLithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
letters ą, ę, į, and ų are not made with the cedilla, but with the unrelated ogonekThe ogonek 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.-Use:...
diacritic; superficially, an ogonek resembles a reversed cedilla (opening to the right instead of the left), but the exact shape is quite different.
External links