Talk:Cedilla

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[edit] Discussion

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


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

/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.

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:

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)

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 (Romanized cursive 'z'). Since many of us have fonts that do not include Ʒ or ʒ but can see Image:Long_z_(yogh).gif 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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 [1]. 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)

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)