A cedilla ( ; from Spanish , "small ceda", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French , ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modified. In Catalan (where it is called ), French, and Portuguese (where it is called a ) it is used only under the letter (to form ), and the entire letter is called, respectively, (i.e. "broken C"), , and (or ). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute from Cameroon.
This diacritic is not to be confused with the ogonek (◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to the diacritical comma, which is used in the Romanian and Latvian alphabet, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.
There is substantial overlap between the cedilla and a diacritical comma. The cedilla is traditionally centered on the letter, and when there is no stroke for it to attach to in that position, as in Ņ ņ, the connecting stroke is omitted, taking the form of a comma. However, the cedilla may instead be shifted left or right to attach to a descending leg. In some orthographies the comma form has been generalized even in cases where the cedilla could attach, as in Ḑ ḑ, but is still considered to be a cedilla. This produces a contrast between attached and non-attached (comma) glyphs, which is usually left to the font but in the cases of Ş ş Ţ ţ and Ș ș Ț ț is formalized by Unicode.
History
The modern grapheme of the cedilla derives from medieval Gothic script or Visigothic script . The use of this sign arose from the limitations of the Latin alphabet. Its name comes from Spanish and appeared in the 17th century, meaning "little z" (as c replaced z in Spanish before e).
Under the letter c, the handwritten cedilla developed through three successive forms: a diacritic z, then a z with a cedilla (subscript and sometimes superscript), and finally the modern c with cedilla. By contrast, the evolution of the e caudata is considered unrelated to that of the cedilla.
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature cursive z. The word cedilla is the diminutive of the Old Spanish name for this letter, ().For being the diminutive of , see definition of cedilla, , 22nd edition, Real Academia Española , which can be seen in context by accessing the site of the Real Academia and searching for . (This was accessed 27 July 2006.) Modern Spanish and isolationist Galician no longer use this diacritic, although it is used in Reintegrationist Galician, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, and French, which gives English the alternative spellings of cedille, from French "", and the Portuguese form . 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.Minsheu, John (1599) Percyvall's (R.) Dictionarie in Spanish and English (as enlarged by J. Minsheu) Edm. Bollifant, London, Chambers' CyclopædiaChambers, Ephraim (1738) Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences (2nd ed.) is cited for the printer-trade variant ceceril in use in 1738. Its use in English is not universal and applies to loan words from French and Portuguese such as façade, limaçon and cachaça (often typed facade, limacon and cachaca because of lack of ç keys on English-language keyboards).
With the advent of typeface modernism, the calligraphic nature of the cedilla was thought somewhat jarring on sans-serif typefaces, 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 the diacritical comma.
In manuscripts
C with cedilla The palatal phoneme /ts/ of the Romance languages derives from a Latin /k/ c that was palatalized and then assibilated. Before vowels that would otherwise trigger a non-palatalized (and therefore incorrect) pronunciation (/k/ before a, o, and u), scribes used various spellings to indicate the "new" pronunciation: simply c, ce, or cz (with e and z functioning as diacritic letters).
Thus ceo and czo were read /tso/: the diacritic e and z prevented the reading /ko/.
This latter notation appears in French as early as the first literary manuscript in the French language, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia (dated to 881 and consisting of 29 verses), where it occurs only once, in verse 21.
According to Greimas (2001), the neuter demonstrative ço appears in the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
However, Greimas gives only the form ço for this text, although the manuscript, rediscovered in the 19th century, contains no cedilla in any of its 29 verses. Moreover, the manuscript dates to 881 rather than broadly to the "10th century".
By contrast, analyzes the form czo as follows:
The z in czo is thus interpreted as a diacritic z which, once placed beneath the c, would become the cedilla.
The Visigothic script is indeed thought to have abbreviated this grapheme around the 11th century in Spain. Initially, the c was written above the z in its form ʒ; later, the c regained its full size while was reduced to a subscript sign. Thus, the Spanish word lanʒa /lantsa/ ("lance") came to be written lança. The usefulness of such a sign, and an early attempt to systematize the notation of /ts/, led (depending on scribes) to the extension of the cedilla before the vowels i and e (çinco, "five"). This was later regarded as a form of hypercorrection, since c alone was sufficient (cinq and çinq are pronounced identically).
Maria Selig confirms this Visigothic origin:
Selig also notes that the diacritic spread across Europe more slowly than its phonetic value, and was in some cases "reappropriated" by different languages to represent sounds unrelated to its original function.
In French, according to Jean Dubois, the cedilla appears "as early as the 8th century in Visigothic manuscripts, but was little used by scribes, who preferred to add an extra letter to indicate the sibilant sound of c (they wrote receut, aperceut)".
Accordingly, in the manuscripts of The Song of Roland, the cedilla is not used, although modern transcriptions add it for ease of reading.
Paleographic e cedilla (e caudata)
A form resembling a cedilla can therefore be found beneath the letter e in medieval manuscripts, with usage attested as early as the 6th century in uncial script. The resulting letter is known as e caudata ("e with a tail", also called "tailed e"). It more or less frequently replaces the Latin digraph ae (often written as the ligature æ, a convention that later spread more widely). This digraph generally represented an open (originally long, until distinctions of vowel length disappeared), derived from the Classical Latin diphthong , which was monophthongized from the 2nd century onward.
This usage continued in manuscripts until the 18th century but did not survive the advent of printing:
It is noteworthy that this letter, represented here as ę (with an ogonek) or ȩ (with a cedilla), has been preserved in Romance philological transcription, whereas the digraph ae (in its ligatured form æ, known as ash) has been retained in the transcription of Germanic languages. ę was used in manuscripts of Old English written in Insular Irish uncial.
Although this sign is often referred to as a "cedilla", this is an anachronism: it has no connection with the letter z, and it more likely derives from a subscript a.
This cedilla-like mark, whose use varied before the spread of printing, can therefore serve as an indicator for the dating of manuscripts by palaeographers. For example, according to the Dictionnaire de paléographie by Louis Mas Latrie (1854), "manuscripts in which one finds the e cedilla rather than œ must be placed between five and seven hundred years ago ", that is, between 1150 and 1350:
Early printing
Manuscript usage was taken up in printing, first by Spanish and Portuguese printers, and then imitated by the French printer Geoffroy Tory. According to Auguste Bernard, as early as 1509, "Tory proposed writing with a cedilla the penultimate e of the third person plural of the perfect tense of verbs of the third conjugation (emere, contendere, etc.) in order to distinguish it from the infinitive," following the model already used shortly before 1509 in the Psalterium quintuplex. If Bernard's account is followed, the cedilla would therefore have been used in Latin printing by Tory from the very beginning of the 16th century.
The cedilla in French, in the form of c-cedilla, was first explicitly advocated in 1529 by the same author, in the introduction to his book , published in 1529 (with printing privilege dated ).
Its subtitle clearly expresses its purpose: l'art et la science de la due et vraie proportion de la lettre ("the art and science of the proper and true proportion of the letter"). This work is, moreover, the first typographical treatise written in French:
This defense of the cedilla was not immediately put into practice. In Tory's system, the cedilla was intended to mark /s/ (and no longer /ts/, since this phoneme had simplified in French by the 13th century and in Old Castilian between the 14th and 16th centuries). The cedilla formed part of Geoffroy Tory's typographical innovations (along with the comma and the apostrophe), whose aim was likely to facilitate the commercialization of the first books printed in French rather than Latin.
He used the cedilla in French for the first time in Le sacre et coronnement de la royne by Guillaume Bochetel, published in 1531.
According to many authors, Tory generalized the use of c-cedilla in his edition of L'Adolescence Clémentine by Clément Marot, the fourth edition of the work, published in 1533. The book had first appeared on 12 August 1532 in Paris, published by Roffet, without cedillas, and then on 7 June 1533 by Tory, this time with cedillas.
In reality, Tory had already introduced the cedilla at the beginning of 1530 in his pamphlet Le sacre et le coronnement de la Royne, imprime par le commandement du Roy nostre Sire, where it appears three times, in the words façon, commença, and Luçon.
The 1533 edition of L'Adolescence Clémentine nevertheless represents the first true generalization of the cedilla in a work that enjoyed success and was intended for a relatively large print run for the period. Tory justified the use of the cedilla in the introduction to this edition using the same arguments already advanced in Champ fleury:
The practical application of Tory's orthographic system is irregular: apostrophes are missing in par faulte dadvis, and oddly placed in combien q'uil—likely a typographical error. As Bernard observes, this was the first work in which Tory applied his orthographic system, and the inexperience of his compositors is evident in the mistakes made by omission or transposition.
From this point onward, the cedilla was adopted by all printers. Before this, supporters of etymological orthography wrote francoys. Usage initially remained unstable. For example, in the Œuvres poétiques of Louise Labé (published by Jean de Tournes in 1555), one finds the cedilla in aperçu but not in perſa (modern perça), which is instead written with an s to avoid perca.
From there, the use of the "c with a tail" (its earliest name) spread throughout France, but it was not until the 17th century that its use became truly common.
In Spanish, the cedilla was abandoned in the 18th century (ç being replaced by z or simple c before e and i), while /ts/ had simplified to /s/ between the 14th and 16th centuries and then to /θ/ in the 17th century. Other related languages (Catalan, French, Portuguese) nevertheless retained it.
After the Renaissance