Talk:Cedilla

Discussion

According to some authorities, it is the "little tail" which is called cedilla.
S.

Yes, in French "ç" is "c cedille" -- Tarquin

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/r/ and /d/ interchangeable in Old Castilian? sounds strange to me... nicky.

Me too. DRAE doesn't carry that meaning but it is in Nebrija. My guess for the alternate form is a misreading or a typo of Nebrija. -- Error 06:58, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

They "r" and "d" were interchanged when both of them produced the sound of a TAPPED "r". The tapped r and "d" sometimes sound similar if the "d" is spoken fast.

The same thing goes for the Neapolitan language spoken in most of S Italy. For example, there is the Neap. word vedé, which is pronounced moreso as veré. This is an Oscan influence, with both Castilian and Neapolitan. IlStudioso 16:12, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

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As for S/T with cedilla vs comma below in Romanian, and the language tagging selecting the appropriate glyph automatically: this probably doesn't happen now, in most cases. But it's what's supposed to happen in Unicode's scheme, which is probably (currently) too idealistic. See also the following documents on similar problems with Unicode:

• Gaps in the System (especially section 2.1.2, which illustrates a similar problem where different languages want different glyphs)
• Convenience for the Wealthy, Virtue for the Poor

So in the status quo, I think The Right Thing to do is to use S/T with cedilla and mark the text as Romanian, if possible. -- pne 14:24, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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At the tail end of the sentence "The tail is the bottom half of a miniature cursive z or Ezh: Ʒ/ʒ," User:Node ue recently removed (). Since many of us have fonts that do not include Ʒ or ʒ but can see just fine, I'm not sure this deletion is a good thing. -- Jmabel 05:41, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

In fact, the cedilla is not just a small z in origin. The entire c-cedilla derives from the Visigothic z. It was only after this was reanalyzed as a c with a diacritic that the cedilla was considered something that could be applied to other letters. Evertype 18:38, 2005 Mar 15 (UTC)

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I am having trouble finding any unicode examples and or search results of small letter a with cedilla. Is this even a thing?

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/latin_extended_a/list.htm doesn't mention it, neither does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Extended-A — Preceding unsigned comment added by Axel Grude (talk • contribs) 14:47, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

• Have a look at the [[1]] page, and search for "a with cedilla". It looks like there isn't any precomposed single glyph for this; the instances of A̧ a̧ in the list on that linked page are just ASCII A or a with the combining cedilla ◌̧ or Unicode codepoint U+0327. See also Cedilla#Encodings. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:08, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Marshallese

You may be interested to know that the Marshallese language's current orthography uses a cedilla below some very unusual letters: l, m, n, and o. — Hippietrail 23:25, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

addition of Soupçon and garçon

Surely soupçon and garçon are not as common in English as façade. I would guess that half of English speakers wouldn't even know soupçon and would consider garçon a foreign word. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:57, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

• The rewording on this is fine. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:17, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

The original wording did not say that they were common, but just that they were the most common [2]. With that said, the rewording by User:Nohat is still much better than what I had written. [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 10:21, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Portuguese

The following was dropped into the article: signed, inappropriately placed (in the lead), and not terribly well written. I've moved it here to talk. Could someone please clean it up and place it back appropriately in the article. - Jmabel | Talk 01:16, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

The portuguese language also uses this hook under the letter "c" (see below); in Portuguese, the name of this diacritic is "cedilha". Example of a word that employs the "cedilha": Conceição. The absence of the "cedilha" in the secon letter "c" would make this letter sound like as (roughly) the "c" in the english word "contact". The "cedilha" changes the pronounciation of the second letter "c" to (also roughly) the "s" as in the english word "see" (again, see below). -- LNP 23:28, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's true that modern Portuguese does not employ ç at the start of a word, but medieval Portuguese did. E.g., "çapato" (shoe), now written "sapato". Given this, perhaps it would be better not to make any mention to whether ç is used at the beginning of a word in Portuguese, or not. Nov. 29 2005.

Romanian

Could someone who knows the Romanian situation well please review Evertype's recent edit? I don't know it well enough to say anything confidently, but (1) it looks to me like the reference to "Romanian authorities" is a bit vague and (2) I have to wonder: this recommends using characters that are not the ones we mainly use, either in the Romanian Wikipedia or when we represent Romanian in the English Wikipedia; furthermore, the recommended characters are still missing from many common fonts. Shouldn't at least this last fact be mentioned? -- Jmabel | Talk 20:13, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

I was one of the people who worked with the Romanian national standards authority (their equivalent of the UK's BSI or the US's ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 to encode these characters. I am happy to have some discussion of this here, however. Evertype 11:09, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC)

Great! So you can doubtless write in the article about who those authorities are, about the availability of fonts that handle this correctly, and about what is considered the prudent approach for implementation in web pages at this time. -- Jmabel | Talk 16:40, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

Removed

I see that this Romanian material has now been removed by User:Bogdangiusca. Bogdan, would I be right to guess that you removed it on the grounds that this is technically not a cedilla? That's true, but few non-Romanians know that, and they are liable to look to "cedilla" for information on the topic. I'd like to restore, but would like to give you a chance to comment first, especially in case I'm confused about what's happening here. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:35, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

I created an article at Ș. This article already states that:

The Romanian Ș (ș) seemingly resembles the Turkish s cedilla, but it is actually a comma (Virgula). While it is common in online contexts to use Ş/ş and Ţ/ţ in writing Romanian, that is only because they look almost right and are much more widely supported in character sets. The orthographically correct characters are Ș/ș and Ț/ț (may not appear on your browser). bogdan ʤjuʃkə | ^Talk 07:35, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Oh. Indeed. I didn't read the rest of the article, just noticed the uncommented removal of a section. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:02, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Does anybody know the origin of cedilla?

I think it is used at firt time by Castillians, but I'm not sure. Am I right? Do anybody add this answer on the article. Here the author wrote that the origin of the name is Spanish, but not the sign. (User:Ludor 20 July 2005)

Please, anyone has read this question? —Ludor 21:18, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I read it, but did not think you were interested in each of us successively announcing our ignorance of the answer. But since you seem to want that: I haven't a clue. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:02, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

According to fr:Cédille, the spelling cz - used to indicate a soft c sound before a, o, or u - "was abbreviated, still in the Middle Ages, in Spain (in eleventh-century Visigoth writing) by first writing a c above a z in the ʒ shape and later, in a reversal, in giving c its full size while reducing the ʒ to an undersign: thus, the Spanish word lancʒa /lantsa/, "lance," came to be written lança. [...] The manuscriptural use was adopted in printing, first by the Spanish (from whom comes the name of the letter, which nonetheless dates from the Seventeenth Century) and the Portuguese, then by the French [...]" Happy? - Ruakh 02:28, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

fr:Cédille is incorrect. The origin is the Visigothic z, which looked like ʒ but had the topber shaped like a small c. As time went on, it got reanalyzed to c + squiggle. That was after the Carolingian z was introduced to Iberia. I do have it on my plate to write this up with examples in due course, but I am busy right now. Evertype 14:08, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Wait, you say fr:Cédille is incorrect, but then you give an explanation that seems to agree with fr:Cédille in every point, or nearly so. What exactly do you find wrong with fr:Cédille's explanation? - Ruakh 16:08, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Intitial and terminal cedilla

Our article asserts that there are French words with initial cedilla and Catalan words with terminal cedilla (and possibly initial cedilla: the wording is unclear in this respect). Can someone provide examples? - Jmabel | Talk 23:53, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Added catalan ones. One thing, there also very rare words in Catalan starting with ç, like ço. Should I mention that?--Hei hei 20:07, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

One common French word, ça (that), begins with c-cedilla, but I don't know any others. --HJMG 07:20, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Added French ça, merci HJMG, and Catalan ça and ço. --Hei hei 03:07, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Apologies

Very sorry - it seems I deleted huge chunks accidentally - I can't explain it at all - embarrassing. Thanks for fixing it, Prosfilaes. I'll put what I intended to post below. --HJMG 16:08, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Cerilla - 'citation needed' tag

OED says "Sp[anish] cerilla, variant of cedilla, due to interchange of d and r". Is this a enough? --HJMG 16:08, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Basically, yes. Can you give edition? And can we presume this is in the definition of "cedilla" rather than elsewhere in the OED? - Jmabel | Talk 20:02, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

It's listed under 'cerilla' (obsolete) in the online OED. Like most of the entries it's labelled 'Second edition 1989'. For the meaning they simply say "=cedilla", then give a few examples of its use in obscure English books. (1591 - 1863) --HJMG 08:06, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Ezh

Ezh was invented in the 19th century (see On the derivation of Yogh and Ezh). The tail of ç is not part of a z. The whole ç is a z, a Visigothic z with a curly top that became reanalyzed as a c. Evertype 20:06, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Berber

• ḍ emphatic D ظ
• ḥ ح
• ṭ emphatic t ط
• ț ts ts
• ẓ emphatic z
• ṣ emphatic s. ص
• ṛ emphatic r
• ğ dj dj
• č tch ch (like in chat)
• ʐ dz

--Toira 02:22, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Spanish keyboard

Spanish speakers had to learn these codes if they wanted to be able to write acute accents before the appearance of Spanish keyboards, but some preferred using the Microsoft Word spell checker to add the accent for them.

Why are *Spanish* speakers mentioned when the Cedilla is no longer used in this language?

A personal note, I guess. Good catch. FilipeS 17:19, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, if you know the other languages spoken in Spain, you would see why ç is on their keyboard. Catalan, Galician, and a few others use it. Otherwise, I see what you're talking about. You are probably referring to the Spanish keyboards in the Latin-American communities. Ç was formerly used in the language, too. IlStudioso 06:17, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

From reflist to references

I read here about the Reflist template: Use this template to create a reference list in an article with a small font. Note that there is no consensus that small font size should always be used for all references; when normal-sized font is more appropriate on an article, use <references /> instead.

The wonderful single footnote (not written by me) to this article says a 1753 citation shows the entire character "ç" ("c" with cedilla). Here it helps for the font to be in the regular size, and not a reduced size. I've therefore converted from reflist to references. -- Hoary (talk) 08:35, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Official consideration as comma

We read of certain diacritics:

they are officially considered commas

What does this mean? (Which officialdoms are involved? What does it mean for a diacritic to be considered a comma?) -- Hoary (talk) 03:28, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Unicode, apparently. I've clarified the article. FilipeS (talk) 14:05, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Alternate origin of cedilla?

Well, I was going over the Greek alphabet a few days ago, and I noticed something. Doesn't it seem quite strange how the final form of the Greek sigma, ς, looks unusually like our c-cedilla, ç. They are both pronounced almost the same. Plus the Greek script has had quite some influences on our Latin script. I hypothesize that ς could've been brought to the attention of the Romans via Syracuse, you know, Sicily was once a Greek land. Now, I know about that one Visigoth letter and all that, so please don't bother telling me about that. But, alas, if this can be disproved, it may be how we have commas or even ogoneks instead of cedillas in diacritics, especially with the Slavic/Baltic groups of languages and Romanian. And maybe Turkish too ... well, no because they just "copied off" of "Western" ideas, in the case of the scripts, replaced the Arabic scripts with the Latin, which I think was a very wise move. Otherwise, who would've been able to read Ottoman Turkish? It used, sorry if I'm exaggerating, many Arabic characters of which almost half of the characters are obsolete in the standard Arabic script today. IlStudioso 06:26, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

@IlStudioso: Coincidence, just as the Cyrillic letter С bears no historical relation to the Latin Alphabet C (it is actually derived from the Lunate sigma, which probably is related to the lowercase Sigma). Hope this helps! ;)03:50, 3 December 2020 (UTC)~;)

Redirection

This article has a link for H-cedilla, among other things, and it redirects back to this article, but there's no information on this character in this article. That seems... weird. 24.85.235.46 (talk) 18:24, 27 March 2011 (UTC) DartNPL

All these letters

The table of example letters shows æ̧, ð̧, ḩ, o̧, œ̧, ʃ̧, ʊ̧, x̧, y̧, and þ̧, but I can't find a description anywhere of what these characters are used for. Can anyone enlighten me? —Typhlosion (talk) 06:19, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Printer-trade variant

Quote from the article: Chambers' Cyclopædia[4] is cited for the printer-trade variant ceceril in use in 1738.[2]

I don't quite get what the word printer-trade means in the context, can anyone explain it here or, if necessary, add a basic clarification to the sentence? --Microcell (talk) 21:43, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Cedilla shape in Marshallese

In standard printed text they are always cedillas, and their omission or the substitution of comma below and dot below diacritics are nonstandard.

I am requesting a reference for that statement as several documents use a detached cedilla, the Marshallese language commission recommended a (non specific) diacritic below. The Marshallese Language Orthography (Standard Spelling) Act of 2010 applies the rules of the MED (1979), but it is not clear what was meant by cedilla, if there is only one correct shape for the cedilla or if the cedilla can have different shapes as it the case in many languages where it can be both detached or attached depending on the font style. --Moyogo/ (talk) 12:16, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I know what you mean. A comma below is not a cedilla. I have the print version of the MED (1979), and it uses all cedillas, not commas below. The Marshallese alphabet postage stamp series uses only cedillas, not commas below. I even have a copy of the Book of Mormon in Marshallese and it uses only cedillas, not commas below. The Adobe letter definitions for ĻļŅņ were originally defined to use a comma below, but Unicode in 1992 inappropriately conflated these with cedillas. But since these glyphs were to be used for Latvian, most polished fonts show only comma below instead of cedilla for the letters associated with Latvian: ĢģĶķĻļŅņŖŗ. A similar issue arose with Romanian Unicode being assigned letters with cedillas, but these were ruled incorrect as Romanian uses commas below. But since there are other established languages that do use the letters with cedilla (such as Turkish and Gagauz), additional code points were created, so now Unicode supports separate ŞşŢţ and ȘșȚț, with the comma below versions correct for Romanian. The same was not done for Latvian, even though corresponding letters with cedillas do exist in Marshallese. The cedilla and comma below were historically incorrectly conflated by Unicode in 1992, but that does not mean that the comma below is a glyph variant of the cedilla, nor does it necessarily follow that they should be assumed to be so — both diacritics are actually separately encoded as optional combining diacritics. Instead of providing references to prove that they are not glyph variants, it should follow that there should be references to prove that they are actually glyph variants. It should be noted that none of the specially marked letters unique to Marshallese have proper Unicode variants, either because of the Latvian display preference (ĻļŅņ), or because there are no corresponding precomposed glyphs for them (M̧m̧N̄n̄O̧o̧). Theoretically, with properly-designed fonts and font display engines, precombined glyphs aren't necessarily to properly display a writing system. But many common fonts still have no support or only rudimentally crude support for combining diacritics, and most assume any need for ĻļŅņ will be in Latvian and will only display the cedilla letters with comma below glyphs, even if separate letters and combining diacritic characters are used instead (automatically displaying canonically equivalent precomposed glyphs, as MediaWiki's software routinely does). - Gilgamesh (talk) 14:03, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, a comma below is not a cedilla. But in some langauges a cedilla can sometimes have the shape of a comma below or other forms which are close or related to it, which is where the whole confusion comes from. My question is: What shape is correct in Marshallese? What reference says so?

Can the Marshallese cedilla be:

• a half-ring-like cedilla (detached and missing the joining stroke) like in Majuro Library or Willson 2008
• a tick-like cedilla like in PREL publications ([3] and others) or Rudiak-Gould 2004
• a comma-like cedilla like in keyobard stickers
• a cedilla with a connecting stroke (centered, left unconnected under n, and connected to the central stroke of m) like in ņ stamp (which you mentionned) or its 2010 re-edition, or UNGEGN document, or like in MED.
• a cedilla with a connecting stroke (always connected, connected to the rightmost stroke of n or m) like in Everson's proposal for additional characters or Eric Muller's document about cedillas and commas below.

I am looking for references because I have the impression the last form (in Everson's and Muller's documents) is wrong (not attached at the right place), and was based on an interpretation of the Wikipedia article. It seems to me the Marshallese readers have not rejected various forms of the cedilla (as long as a single form is used at one time in a document), none of the references I have found state that there is only one acceptable form. It might be useful to remember that both the Romanian and Latvian modern orthographies started with attached cedillas but have now commas below and have clear rules as to which form is correct . It would be helpful if a Marshallese reference clearly stated what form of the cedilla is correct and which is not. Having on shape in MED and other documents doesn't mean all the other shapes found are incorrect.

--Moyogo/ (talk) 15:04, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I had a look at the MED yesterday. The cedilla is indeed attached to the rightmost stem on most m and n in the Introduction, (pp. xiii-xxxiv) but in the dictionary sections (pp. 1-501) the cedilla is not on the rightmost stem on m nor n but closer to the center stem than to the rightmost one under m and centered under n (in both bold and italic). This is not clear as to wether there is only one acceptable form (meaning one part of the dictionary is correct while the other is not).

I also had a look at the LDS material which I hadn't seen before, and it is consistent with Muller and Everson description. The Book of Mormon is there [4], there are also a lot of other PDF files. --Moyogo/ (talk) 05:48, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I hadn't been keeping up with this discussion. No, I'm not aware of any situation of Marshallese rejecting alternative diacritic shapes. All I know is what is prescribed, and what actually appears in the MED, official postal stamps and in the BoM, and all printed texts in general that I've seen that use this orthography. Note that the MED orthography with cedillas, though now officially adopted, is one of two orthographies in common use — the former official orthography is still commonly used, but gradually being replaced by the new orthography as younger people learn and adopt it. The differences between the two orthographies are detailed at the article on the Marshallese language. - Gilgamesh (talk) 21:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

The MED spelling rules have been officially adopted by the RMI in the Marshallese Language Orthography (Standard Spelling) Act, 2010. P.L.2010-45. It had already been adopted by the RMI Ministry of Education before that. The Marshallese Language Orthography Act mentions an amended MED, it would be interested to know what they mean exactly. As I said before the MED itself uses the classic cedilla shape but doesn’t say anything about it’s acceptable shape(s). --Moyogo/ (talk) 10:42, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Request

I'd be interested in an explanation of why ç is used instead of s in French, as to my ears the sounds are often quite similar. Is it for Latin words that no longer sound like they used to due to sound changes?

I've also added a bit more about modernist cedilla designs, which I know have been used in French and other languages quite a bit and I think are worth mentioning. But I'm not a very good French-speaker (my interest in them came through knowledge of font design and internationalisation) and I think it might be nice if someone who is took a look at what I've added. Blythwood (talk) 09:47, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

In fact the sounds of ç and s are not quite similar, but identical in French as well as in Modern Portuguese (in Old Portuguese ç sounded more like a 'ts'). The main reason for using ç in a word instead of s is etymological: it's a way of retaining a spelling that is more similar to the original Latin root: façade <- facies; français <- francus. This explains why modern Spanish no longer uses ç: when they decided for a spelling simplification, all etymological spellings were replaced with phonetic ones. —capmo (talk) 19:57, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Brilliant, that's what I assumed was going on. Would adding that make sense? I think it could be informative/helpful for people with knowledge of a lot of words with Latin roots. Blythwood (talk) 20:20, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I think that this could be added to the c cedilla article. But unfortunately I have no references at hand to back that information. If you happen to find some sources on this subject, please go ahead. —capmo (talk) 20:30, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

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