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Cedilla | |
| U+0327 (combining diacritic) U+00B8 (spacing symbol, ISO/IEC 8859) |
Acedilla (/sɪˈdɪlə/sih-DIL-ə; 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, includingVute fromCameroon.
This diacritic is not to be confused with theogonek (◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to thediacritical comma, which is used in the Romanian andLatvian alphabet, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.
There is substantial overlap between the cedilla and adiacritical comma. The cedilla is traditionally centered on the letter, and when there is no stroke for it to attach to in that position, as inŅ 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 inḐ 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 ofŞ ş Ţ ţ andȘ ș Ț ț is formalized by Unicode.
The moderngrapheme of the cedilla derives from medievalGothic script orVisigothic script⟨ꝣ⟩. 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" (asc replacedz in Spanish beforee).
Under the letterc, the handwritten cedilla developed through three successive forms: a diacriticz, then az with a cedilla (subscript and sometimes superscript), and finally the modernc with cedilla. By contrast, the evolution of thee caudata is considered unrelated to that of the cedilla.
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniaturecursivez. The wordcedilla is thediminutive of theOld Spanish name for this letter,ceda (zeta).[1] Modern Spanish and isolationist Galician no longer use this diacritic, although it is used inReintegrationist Galician,Portuguese,[2]Catalan,Occitan, andFrench, which givesEnglish the alternative spellings ofcedille, fromFrench "cédille", and thePortuguese formcedilha. An obsolete spelling ofcedilla iscerilla.[2] The earliest use in English cited by theOxford English Dictionary[2] is a 1599 Spanish-English dictionary and grammar.[3] Chambers'Cyclopædia[4] is cited for the printer-trade variantceceril in use in 1738.[2] Its use in English is not universal and applies to loan words fromFrench andPortuguese such asfaçade,limaçon andcachaça (often typedfacade,limacon andcachaca because of lack ofç keys on English-language keyboards).
With the advent oftypeface modernism, the calligraphic nature of the cedilla was thought somewhat jarring onsans-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.[10] This reduces the visual distinction between the cedilla and thediacritical comma.
The palatalphoneme /ts/ of theRomance languages derives from aLatin /k/c that waspalatalized and thenassibilated. Before vowels that would otherwise trigger a non-palatalized (and therefore incorrect) pronunciation (/k/ beforea,o, andu), scribes used various spellings to indicate the "new" pronunciation: simplyc,ce, orcz (withe andz functioning asdiacritic letters).[11]
Thusceo andczo were read /tso/: the diacritice andz prevented the reading /ko/.
This latter notation appears in French as early as the first literary manuscript in the French language, theSequence of Saint Eulalia (dated to 881 and consisting of 29 verses), where it occurs only once, in verse 21.
According toGreimas (2001), the neuter demonstrativeço appears in theSequence of Saint Eulalia.[12]
However, Greimas gives only the formço 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,Pierre Ivart [fr] analyzes the formczo as follows:[13]
Ontc andcz. These graphemes therefore representts. The case of "czo" (v. 21) is fairly clear: the scribe could not usec alone beforeo to representtch, since beforeo,c always has the valuek (except in theOaths of Strasbourg). He therefore resorts to an experimental graphemecz.
Thez inczo is thus interpreted as a diacriticz which, once placed beneath thec, would become the cedilla.
The Visigothic script is indeed thought to have abbreviated this grapheme around the 11th century in Spain. Initially, thec was written above thez in its formʒ; later, thec regained its full size whileʒ was reduced to a subscript sign. Thus, the Spanish wordlanʒa /lantsa/ ("lance") came to be writtenlança. 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 vowelsi ande (çinco, "five"). This was later regarded as a form ofhypercorrection, sincec alone was sufficient (cinq andçinq are pronounced identically).
Maria Selig confirms this Visigothic origin:[14]
The history of the cedilla and its diffusion is well known today, so I shall confine myself to a very brief synthesis. As a result of the application of Visigothic script to new Spanish sounds, <ç>, with a subscript (sometimes superscript) <z>, appears from the earliest monuments of Castilian. The use of the cedilla has also been observed in the oldest charters written in Provençal (hence its later presence in Catalan) and in French.
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 toJean 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 ofc (they wrotereceut,aperceut)".[15]
Accordingly, in the manuscripts ofThe Song of Roland, the cedilla is not used, although modern transcriptions add it for ease of reading.
A form resembling a cedilla can therefore be found beneath the lettere in medievalmanuscripts, with usage attested as early as the 6th century inuncial script. The resulting letter is known ase caudata ("e with a tail", also called "tailed e"). It more or less frequently replaces the Latindigraphae (often written as theligatureæ, a convention that later spread more widely). This digraph generally represented an open/ɛ/ (originally long, until distinctions ofvowel length disappeared), derived from the Classical Latindiphthong/ae̯/, which wasmonophthongized from the 2nd century onward.
This usage continued in manuscripts until the 18th century but did not survive the advent ofprinting:[16]
[The scribe ofThe Song of Roland wrote]ciel orcel with a cedillede because, until the 13th century, Latin words inæ orœ were often written with a cedillede; recognizing the Latincælum beneath the Frenchcel, he allowed himself (which has no meaning in French) to use a cedillede (vv. 545, 646, 723, 1156, and 1596).
It is noteworthy that this letter, represented here asę (with anogonek) orȩ (with a cedilla), has been preserved inRomance philological transcription, whereas the digraphae (in its ligatured formæ, known asash) has been retained in the transcription ofGermanic languages.ę was used in manuscripts ofOld 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 letterz, and it more likely derives from a subscripta.
This cedilla-like mark, whose use varied before the spread of printing, can therefore serve as an indicator for the dating of manuscripts bypalaeographers. For example, according to theDictionnaire de paléographie by Louis Mas Latrie (1854), "manuscripts in which one finds the cedillede rather thanœ must be placed between five and seven hundred years ago", that is, between 1150 and 1350:[16]
The lettere with a cedilla foræ therefore seems to characterize the eleventh century. Mabillon,De Re Diplomatica, p. 367, supports this thesis. He already showsę forae in the tenth century, e.g.suę forsuae,ex sacramentario Ratoldi, no. 587. But he also shows that this usage was not yet general and citesGalliae,ex ms. codice Remigio. His citations of fragments from the eleventh century generally containę forae. "Ex codice nostro S. Germani, 527:sapię forsapientiae." In the twelfth century, the same scholar showsę foroe, while plaine is used forae. "Ex Flora Corb. nos. 488 and 489,pęno forpoena (beginning of the twelfth century);dicte ecclesie fordictae ecclesiae." Charters provide the most compelling evidence and seem to prove thate with a cedilla used forae, when the usage is general, denotes the eleventh century.
Manuscript usage was taken up inprinting, first by Spanish and Portuguese printers, and then imitated by the French printerGeoffroy Tory. According to Auguste Bernard, as early as 1509,[17] "Tory proposed writing with a cedilla the penultimatee 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 thePsalterium 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 ofc-cedilla, was first explicitly advocated in 1529 by the same author, in the introduction to his bookChamp fleury [fr], published in 1529 (with printing privilege dated 5 September 1526).[17]
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:
C beforeo, in French pronunciation and language, is sometimes hard, as incoquin,coquard,coq,coquillard; sometimes it is soft, as ingarcon,macon,francois, and other similar words.
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 thisphoneme had simplified in French by the 13th century and inOld Castilian between the 14th and 16th centuries). The cedilla formed part of Geoffroy Tory's typographical innovations (along with thecomma and theapostrophe), 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 inLe sacre et coronnement de la royne by Guillaume Bochetel, published in 1531.[18]
According to many authors, Tory generalized the use ofc-cedilla in his edition ofL'Adolescence Clémentine byClément 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.[19]
In reality, Tory had already introduced the cedilla at the beginning of 1530[20] in his pamphletLe sacre et le coronnement de la Royne, imprime par le commandement du Roy nostre Sire, where it appears three times, in the wordsfaçon,commença, andLuçon.
The 1533 edition ofL'Adolescence Clémentine nevertheless represents the first true generalization of the cedilla in a work that enjoyed success and was intended for a relatively largeprint run for the period. Tory justified the use of the cedilla in the introduction to this edition using the same arguments already advanced inChamp fleury:
[published] with certain marked accents, namely on the masculineé as distinct from the feminine, on words joined together by synaloephas, and under theç when it takes on the pronunciation ofs, which until now, through lack of consideration, had not been done in the French language, although it was and remains very necessary.
The practical application of Tory's orthographic system is irregular: apostrophes are missing inpar faulte dadvis, and oddly placed incombien 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.[17]
From this point onward, the cedilla was adopted by all printers.[17] Before this, supporters of etymologicalorthography wrotefrancoys. Usage initially remained unstable. For example, in theŒuvres poétiques ofLouise Labé (published byJean de Tournes in 1555), one finds the cedilla inaperçu but not inperſa (modernperça), which is instead written with ans to avoidperca.
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.
InSpanish, the cedilla was abandoned in the 18th century (ç being replaced byz or simplec beforee andi), 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.
The introduction (and subsequent retention) of such a character in written French was an effective and broadly accepted way of definitively resolving the problem of the ambiguous pronunciation of the Latin letterc. Indeed, whenc precedesa,o, oru, it is pronounced /k/; when it precedes any other vowel, it is pronounced /s/. The sign therefore makes it possible to preserve links with the past and to maintain the graphic coherence of the language by making spelling less ambiguous. The presence of a cedilla in a word or form keeps visible the relationships with theetymon and withderived forms or related forms.
ForAlbert Dauzat, "the simplification of an irrational orthography was in keeping with the tendencies of the 17th century, enamoured of clarity and reason. Many writers called for reform [...]".[21] The cedilla therefore became a stake in the many projects fororthographic reform of the French language.
With regard to these attempts at orthographic reform, the history of thet-cedilla in French is exemplary.
In 1663, inRome la ridicule, Caprice by Saint-Amant, the printer and proofreader for theElzeviers in Amsterdam, Simon Moinet, used the cedilla under the lettert in French (for example, he wroteinvanţion).[22]
In 1766,Jean-Raymond de Petity [fr], preacher to the queen, proposed the use of the cedilla undert to distinguish cases where it is read /t/ from those where it is pronounced /s/:[16]
One could still derive another benefit from the cedilla in favour of children and foreigners, who are often embarrassed about how they should pronounce the lettert in certain words; this would be to apply this sign to that letter when it has the value ofs, as in the wordsminutie,portion,faction,quotien, etc. By this expedient its pronunciation would be regulated, and one would no longer confuse the cases where it has its natural value, as in the wordspartie,question,digestion,chrétien. When it costs so little to remedy imperfections, it is gratuitously wishing to perpetuate them to allow them to subsist.
Ambroise Firmin-Didot, in hisObservations sur l'orthographe, ou ortografie, française (1868), proposed to theAcadémie française a similar reform project aiming to introduce at-cedilla,ţ (depending on configuration, this may appear as a comma rather than a cedilla), in words wheret is pronounced /s/ beforei. This would have eliminated a large number of irregularities in spelling (nous adoptions ~les adoptions,pestilence ~pestilentiel,il différencie ~il balbutie). One would thus have written:les adopţions,pestilenciel (withc preferred in order to agree better with the basepestilence),il différencie,il balbuţie.
In fact, as the author himself notes, the grammarians ofPort-Royal had already proposed such an improvement before him (by means of at with asubscript dot:les adopṭions). The project ultimately remained a dead letter.
In the same spirit as that of Firmin-Didot, the generalization ofc- andt-cedilla was defended by an Enlightenmentgrammarian such asNicolas Beauzée. Thus, according to the 19th-century encyclopedist B. Jullien:[23]
The celebrated grammarian Nicolas Beauzée, who devoted himself extensively to the modifications to be introduced into our orthography in order to regularize it, wished to generalize the use of the cedilla, and derived such advantage from it that one can only regret that theAcademy did not take up this project in order to introduce it into ourwriting. According to Beauzée, the cedilla should indicate not only for the letterc, but also for other letters when appropriate, and notably fort, the transition from a hard sound to asibilant sound. This being the case, a simple cedilla would eliminate certain spelling differences that nothing justifies.
Thus one writesmonarque withqu, andmonarchie withch; Beauzée proposed thatch written without a cedilla should always be pronounced /k/, and that the sibilantch, that ofchien andcheval, should be written with a cedilla,çhien,çheval: one would then writemonarche andmonarçhie. Theetymology would be preserved, and the pronunciation exactly represented.
We writechœur and pronounce /kœʁ/; we write and pronouncechose; and this diversity of pronunciation is often a difficulty for those who do not know French. According to Beauzée, one should writechœur andçhose,Achaïe andAçhille,Michel-Ange andarçhevêque, and so on; note that this would hardly be a change in spelling, merely an extremely slight addition, which nevertheless would have the happiest results for all. How is it that the body established to guide the French language does not make every effort to adopt such wise corrections?
Beauzée quite reasonably extended the application of the cedilla to the lettert. Indeed, this letter very often takes in French the sibilant sound ofs, without there being any general rule for this. Thusnous portions anddes portions,nous inventions anddes inventions, are written exactly the same way and pronounced differently; Beauzée proposed placing the cedilla under thet pronounced ass. Immediately all difficulty would disappear, and etymology would be preserved. The same was to apply in all such words asminutie,calvitie, etc., wheret takes the sound ofs. By reciprocity, one could later restore thec-cedilla in some words from which it has been improperly removed to make room for plainc. Such is the case, for example, withmince derived fromminutus,accourcir derived fromcourt, where thec not present in theroot was substituted, under the influence of pronunciation, for thet required by etymology.
One could multiply such examples; it suffices for me to have shown how one might successively introduce into our orthography some perfectly rational changes which, after a short time, would render it regular, while not offending usage. Assuredly this would be a fine service rendered to our language.
Moreover, it would have been possible to write the wordslança andfrançais using the letters, since the phoneme /ts/ no longer existed at the time of theborrowing of the cedilla. Thephoneme had even merged with the other /s/ sounds. However, it was the visual and etymologizing appearance of the word that prevailed. The spelling*lansa would have introduced an awkward alternation:*il lansa ~ils lancèrent. In other languages, such as Spanish, the spelling of a conjugated verb may be inconsistent: one now writeslanzar, thus "cutting oneself off" from the Latin etymologylanceare, which was more explicitly reflected inlançar (though it reappears in alternation withlance in the presentsubjunctive).
In addition to maintaining visual etymological coherence, the cedilla also makes it possible, in certain cases, to resolve spelling problems for the sound /s/ derived from /k/. For example,reçu retains a link withrecevoir, but above all could not be written in any other way:*resu would be read /ʁəzy/ and*ressu /resy/. The same applies toleçon and other words in which aschwa is followed by the phoneme /s/. In other cases, plainc without a cedilla is retained. The retention ofc in such words is explained by an orthographicarchaism: the Latin or Frenchetymon remains visible, allowing greater visual coherence by preserving a link between the cedilla-markedderived form and theroot from which it originates. In this way,lança andlançons remain clearly and visually connected to the rootlanc- /lɑ̃s/ oflancer,lance, etc. Likewise,reçu retains a link withrecevoir. Conversely, when the sound /k/ must be obtained before the graphic vowelse,i, andy, au is used as a diacritic letter followingc:accueil.
Used as a diacritic detached from its originalc, the cedilla was extended to other letters in other languages from the 19th century onward.
Although the cedilla appeared in Frenchmanuscripts as early as the 9th century and in Frenchprinting from 1530 onward, the wordcédille itself is attested[24] only in 1611, in the altered formcerille, and then ascédille in 1654–1655. The wordcerilla had, however, already been borrowed fromSpanish in 1492, and the formcedilla is attested in 1558. In Spanish,cedilla means "little z" and is the diminutive of the name of the letterz in Spanish,zeda (now obsolete, likeceda;[25] the current name beingzeta), itself derived from the Latinzeta, from Greekzêta, "the sixth letter of theGreek alphabet". Greekzêta is itself "borrowed fromPhoenician (cf.Hebrewzajit,Arabiczayn)".[24]
In his article in theEncyclopédie,[26] and later in hisŒuvres,[27] the termcedilla was mistakenly interpreted byDumarsais in French as meaning "little c" rather than "little z", due to the shape of the cedilla:
The termcédille comes from the Spanishcedilla, which means "little c"; for the Spaniards also have, like us, thec without a cedilla, which then has a hard sound before the three lettersa,o,u; and when they wish to give a soft sound to thec preceding one of these three letters, they subscript the cedilla to it, which they callc con cedilla, that is,c with cedilla. Moreover, this character might well derive from the Greeksigma represented thus Ϛ, as we have noted under the letter c (sic); for thec with cedilla is pronounced likes at the beginning of the wordssage,second,si,sobre,sucre.
In French,Catalan,Occitan (more widespread in the classical orthography), andPortuguese, the Hispanic cedilla is used under the letterc to indicate /s/ beforea,o, andu. In Catalan and Occitan (classical orthography only),-ç is also used word-finally to indicate/s, for example indolç ("sweet").
Friulian uses a cedilledc to represent[tʃ].
InRomanian, the diacritic plays a much more prominent role:Ș ș (formerly: Ş ş)[ʃ], andȚ ț (formerly: Ţ ţ)[ts]. After having been written usingso-called Glagolitic characters of Church Slavonic until the 19th century, Romanian has since been written in the Latin alphabet. Its orthography then drew partly on Italian and French models, and partly, especially with regard to letters bearing diacritics, on transliteration practices close to those of the Balkan linguistic area. The most recent major reforms date from 1953, followed by more chaotic changes after the end of communism. Modern Romanian normally uses two letters with asubscript comma.
In 2003, theRomanian Academy specified that the lettersș andț share the same diacritic: a comma placed a short distance beneath the letterss andt, rather than a cedilla.[28]
Because theISO/IEC 8859-2 andUnicode standards initially treated the Romanian subscript comma as merely a graphic variant of the cedilla, cedilleds (U+015E, U+015F) became widespread in computing, especially since it also exists in Turkish (allowing a single ISOcharacter set for both languages). Cedilledt (U+0162, U+0163), however, has most often continued to be represented as at with a subscript comma, primarily for aesthetic reasons. As a result, modern fonts most often display ans with a cedilla and at with a cedilla shaped like a comma.
Unicode now distinguishes the two characters, as shown in the illustration. The characters named "Latin capital letterS with comma below" (U+0218) and "Latin small letters with comma below" (U+0219), as well as "Latin capital letterT with comma below" (U+021A) and "Latin small lettert with comma below" (U+021B), are preferred in careful typography.
Foralphabetical sorting, the two Romanian letters with subscript comma (or cedilla) are considered distinct letters, ordered afters andt.
Both letters have been used in the orthography ofTurkish since theromanization adopted on November 1, 1928. They are regarded as distinct letters, ordered respectively afterc ands, and not as variants of those letters. The use ofç for[t͡ʃ] may have been inspired byAlbanian usage, whileş appears to follow Romanian practice.
TheTurkmen alphabet, adopted in 1991 following the independence ofTurkmenistan, is largely inspired by Western alphabets, and particularly by Turkish. As in Turkish, it includes Çç[tʃ] and Şş[ʃ].
InAzerbaijani, the cedilla is used, for example, iniçmək[ˈit͡ʃmæk] ("to drink") anddanışmak[daniʃmak] ("to consult").
In the Tatar Latin alphabetJaᶇalif (Yañalif) orYañalatinitsa ("new Latin alphabet"), which was adopted in 1999 and is commonly used on the Internet, two letters with a cedilla are employed:
In the literary Tatar language (inKazan), the letterç is pronounced[ɕ], whilec is[ʑ]. In the western and southern parts of the Tatar-speaking area (Mişär),ç is[t͡ʃ], or[t͡s] in the north, andc is[d͡ʒ].In Siberia, in the eastern part of the Tatar-speaking area,ç is[ts], andc is[ʒ].
In the current orthography ofAlbanian, adopted in 1908 at theCongress of Monastir, the letterç is used to represent[t͡ʃ].[29]
Latvian uses a cedilla in the form of a "subscript comma" to indicate thepalatalization of the consonants /g/, /k/, /l/, /n/, and /r/, written asģ,ķ,ļ,ņ, andŗ. For reasons of legibility, this diacritic is placed above the lowercaseg, where it may take several forms, including a curvedquotation mark, an invertedcomma, or anacute accent. For the uppercaseG, where legibility is not an issue, the diacritic remains below:Ģ.
As the pronunciation ofr andŗ is no longer distinguished in standard Latvian, the latter letter was removed from the orthography during the years of Soviet occupation. This reform was generally not accepted by Latvians in exile. After Latvia regained independence in 1991,ŗ was nevertheless not reinstated in the official orthography.
Latvian orthography, derived from German, introduced cedillas andogoneks in order to enrich an alphabet of German origin that was insufficient to represent all Latvian sounds. Thus, Ģ, Ķ, Ļ, and Ņ still denote the palatalized equivalents ofG,K,L, andN. Until the beginning of the 20th century, Latvian orthography was highly irregular.
Some recently created alphabets directly inspired by the Latin alphabet have added numerous diacritics to address mismatches between sounds and letters. A well-known example isVietnamese, which does not use the cedilla. By contrast, theMarshallese alphabet does include it, and is often cited as a notable example of an alphabet devised by linguists studying the language.
InKurdish, examples includeşer ("war") andpiçûk ("small").
Marshallese (aMalayo-Polynesian language spoken in theMarshall Islands) is written using a Latin alphabet that includes several unusual cedilled letters:l,m,n, ando, namelyļ,m̧,ņ, ando̧. Of these, onlyl andn exist as precomposed Unicode characters (as of Unicode version 4). The others must be composed using the combining cedilla U+0327. Care should be taken not to encodeo with cedilla aso with anogonek (ǫ).
According to a foundational grammar available online,[30]ļ would correspond to/ɫ/,m̧ to/mʷ/ (labialized /m/),ņ to/ɳ/ (retroflex /n/), ando̧ to a type of long /oː/. These values are not confirmed by a study of Marshallese phonology,[31] which does not discuss the current orthography.
TheGeneral Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages recommends avoiding diacritics above graphemes to modify phonetic value, reserving that position for tone marking. Diacritics below graphemes are therefore preferred for phonetic modification. The cedilla is one such diacritic, indicatingnasalization in practice, notably inDii,Kako,Karang,Maka,Mbodomo,Mundani,Pana, andVute.
Nasalized vowels marked with a cedilla include:
InKinande, the cedilla is used to indicateadvanced tongue root articulation in vowels, notablyi andu:
In the orthographies developed by the New Tribes Mission forJodï,Maco, andPiaroa, the cedilla is used to indicate nasalized vowels.
The cedilla should not be confused with theogonek, which is not discussed in this article. Languages such asNavajo,Apache,Polish, and, as in the example below,Lithuanian, do not use cedillas but ogoneks:
In theInternational Phonetic Alphabet,ç represents thevoiceless palatal fricative. This sound does not occur in French.
Alan Timberlake uses the cedilla to indicate consonantpalatalization in a Russian grammar published in 2004:[32] p̧ b̧ ţ ḑ ķ ģ ç̆ ʒ̧̆ ş ş̆ x̧ v̧ z̧ z̧̆ m̧ ņ ļ ŗ.
BasicASCII (the American version of theISO/IEC 646 standard encoding characters from 0 to 127) does not include letters with diacritics. At a time when it was often the only availablecode page, some users simulated the cedilla by placing acomma after the letter; for example, writingc,a força.
However, national variants of ISO 646 used the few non-invariant positions of the standard to encode additional punctuation marks and diacritics:
| In Latin, Cyrillic and Greek |
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| InEarly Cyrillic |
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| InIndic | |
| In other scripts | |
| Marks used as diacritics |
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| Non-diacritic uses | |
| InUnicode |
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