T-comma (majuscule:Ț, minuscule:ț) is a letter which consists of a t with adiacritical comma underneath it, and is distinct fromt-cedilla. It is part of theRomanian alphabet, used to represent theRomanian language sound/t͡s/, thevoiceless alveolar affricate (like the letter C in Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet). The letter is also a part of the Finno-UgricLivonian language alphabet, representing the/c/ sound.[1]
It is written as the letterT with a smallcomma below and it has both the lower-case (U+021B) and the upper-case variants (U+021A).
The letter was proposed in theBuda Lexicon, a book published in 1825, which included two texts byPetru Maior,Orthographia romana sive Latino-valachica una cum clavi andDialogu pentru inceputul limbei române, introducing ș for/ʃ/ and ț for/t͡s/.[2]
T-comma was not part of earlyUnicode versions; it was introduced only in Unicode 3.0.0 (September 1999) at the request of the Romanian national standardization body. Thus, some legacy systems do not havefonts compatible with it; for example,Microsoft'sWindows XP requires installing the European Union Expansion Font Update.[3] Full support of this letter has been available onMacintosh computer sinceMac OS X and onPC sinceWindows Vista. Although accessibility issues are a concern only on legacy systems, because of inertia or ignorance, or both, some newly-produced Romanian texts still useŢ (T-cedilla, available from Unicode version 1.1.0, June 1993).
The letter is placed in Unicode in theLatin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", as the "Latin capital letter T with comma below" (U+021A) and "Latin small letter t with comma below" (U+021B).[4] In HTML these can be encoded byȚ andț, respectively.
In Windows XP, most of the fonts including Arial Unicode MS render T-cedilla as T-comma because T-cedilla was not believed to be used in any language. (It is in fact used, but in very few languages. T with Cedilla exists as part of theGeneral Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, in someGagauz orthographies, inlocal spelling usages for theKabyle language, and possibly elsewhere.) Technically, this is incorrect as a mismatching glyph is associated with a certain character code. Therefore, text written using S-cedilla and T-cedilla can often look as if it had been written using S-comma and T-comma. However, in order to correctly encode and render bothS-comma and T-comma, one has to install the European Union Expansion Font Update. There is no official way to add keyboard support for these characters. In order to type them, one has to either installthird-party keyboards, or use theCharacter Map.
All Linux distributions are able to correctly render S-comma and T-comma, since at least 2005. If these characters are missing from a certain font, they will be substituted with the glyph from another font. Although theX.Org Server supports the correct keyboard (ro comma) since at least 2005, selecting this keyboard from the user interface (e.g.GNOME Keyboard Properties) has only recently[when?] been made possible.
| Preview | Ț | ț | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW | LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 538 | U+021A | 539 | U+021B |
| UTF-8 | 200 154 | C8 9A | 200 155 | C8 9B |
| Numeric character reference | Ț | Ț | ț | ț |
| In Latin, Cyrillic and Greek |
|
|---|---|
| InEarly Cyrillic |
|
| InIndic | |
| In other scripts | |
| Marks used as diacritics |
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| Non-diacritic uses | |
| InUnicode |
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