# La cedilla (ç)



## SerinusCanaria3075

This letter (C with a diacritical mark) is supposed to be some sort of corruption from the small cursive Z as I understand. But...
Doesn't the evolution of such letter (used today in Catalan, French and Portuguese among others) derive from Greek origins?
The small case "Zita" and "Sigma" are something that caught my attention since both create (I think, not really sure) a similar sound to the ç.

z ς


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## Outsider

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Doesn't the evolution of such letter (used today in Catalan, French and Portuguese among others) derive from Greek origins?


Not at all. The most common sources of "ç" in Portuguese, French, Catalan and Old Spanish were Latin _c_ followed by _e_ or _i_, and Latin _t(i)_ (palatalized).



SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> The small case "Zita" and "Sigma" are something that caught my attention since both create (I think, not really sure) a similar sound to the ç.


I don't think that's very likely. It's fairly consensual in Romance linguistics that the original sound of the "ç" was the affricate [ts].


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## SerinusCanaria3075

Ah, I see. In fact, I think the small case sigma (open) is archaic in Greek and I don't know if they even use it anymore.
In Turkish the ç is part of the alphabet and pronounced _very _different than the regular C. I'm pretty sure that in French and Portuguese the ç is simply a C with a diacritic and not part of the alphabet at all.


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## Outsider

You are correct about French and Portuguese, although other languages which adopted this symbol later, such as Turkish, do include it in their alphabet.

I understand now the Greek letter you were talking about. No, it's not obsolete. It's just a variant of subscript sigma used at the end of words. Elsewhere, the one that resembles an "o" is used.

Who knows, maybe there _was_ some Greek inspiration in the development of the c-cedilla in western Europe.


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## modus.irrealis

With Outsider's comment about "ç" originally representing a [ts] sound, it would make a lot of sense that "ç" evolved from a form of the letter "z", since the latter often represent that sound in Western European alphabets (I know of Italian, German, Old French).

There may be a really early Greek influence because it's possible that in some dialects of Greek the letter ζ represented a [dz] sound. On the other hand, in the alphabets of the Italic languages other than Latin, the value of z seems to have been [ts], so if this is their innovation, maybe it all goes back to them.


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## Outsider

I would be skeptical of any such influences; they all seem too old. Those ancient uses had probably been forgotten when the Romance languages started to be written down.


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## avok

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Ah, I see. In fact, I think the small case sigma (open) is archaic in Greek and I don't know if they even use it anymore.
> In Turkish the ç is part of the alphabet and pronounced _very _different than the regular C.
> 
> Yes, ç is "the English ch" in Turkish.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that in French and Portuguese the ç is simply a C with a diacritic and not part of the alphabet at all.
> 
> As you know in French and Portuguese it is pronounced as "s" But I guess, Spanish had also "ç" sometime in the history, right?


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## SerinusCanaria3075

> I'm pretty sure that in French and Portuguese the ç is simply a C with a diacritic and not part of the alphabet at all.
> 
> As you know in French and Portuguese it is pronounced as "s" But I guess, Spanish had also "ç" sometime in the history, right?


I think it was in the early 1800's when Spanish eliminated the cedilla but there are earlier texts in Spanish that may seem like Portuguese to someone who didn't know the difference. 
Old Spanish: Mançana, Cabeça, Coraçón...
Modern Spanish: Manzana, Cabeza, Corazón
Portuguese:Maçã, Cabeça, Coração


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## avok

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> I think it was in the early 1800's when Spanish eliminated the cedilla but there are earlier texts in Spanish that may seem like Portuguese to someone who didn't know the difference.
> Old Spanish: Mançana, Cabeça, Coraçón...
> Modern Spanish: Manzana, Cabeza, Corazón
> Portuguese:Maçã, Cabeça, Coração


 
Graçias,

I think, Spanish looks really nice with "ç"  I don't understand why "ç" was kicked out of the Spanish language


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## Outsider

It became redundant, when the sound written as "z" merged with the sound written as "ç/c".


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## David

All from Wikipedia with citations to DRAE and OED:

Visigothic script was a type of medieval script... originated in the Visigothic kingdom in Hispania...also called littera toletana or littera mozarabica...used from approximately the late 7th century until the 13th century, mostly in Visigothic Iberia but also somewhat in southern France. It was perfected in the 9th-11th centuries and declined afterwards...
features of the script include ... special Visigothic z, which after adoption into Carolingian handwriting eventually transformed into the c-cedilla, ç.

A cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail originated as the bottom half of a miniature cursive "z" [in Visigothic script]. The word "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for this letter, ceda, where it was first used. Modern Spanish, however, no longer uses this diacritic. An obsolete spelling of cedilla is cerilla.


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## avok

Outsider said:


> It became redundant, when the sound written as "z" merged with the sound written as "ç/c".


 
That's to say.... "ç" became "th" ?


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## Outsider

In some dialects. In others, it became "ss" (_seseo_).


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## avok

Outsider said:


> You are correct about French and Portuguese, although other languages which adopted this symbol later, such as Turkish, do include it in their alphabet.
> 
> I don't understand why French and Portuguese don't include "ç" in their alphabets as a separate letter.


 


Outsider said:


> In some dialects. In others, it became "ss" (_seseo_).
> 
> So.....the "z" sound had been pronounced as "ss/th" before "ç" became "ss/th"


 


JGreco said:


> Sometimes I think it would make more sense to make the spelling a "ss" for Latin American Castellano to keep it from the confusion of the "th" pronunciation of "z" that is common in Spain and eliminated in Latin America. I notice that in Brazilian Portuguese they have done this with a few words such as (Acção) written in as "Ação" in Brazilian reflecting pronunciation. You would think they would start doing this in Castellano.
> 
> Yes, but in Brazilian Portuguese, there is a bunch of words that have different orthography but in Spanish, there's just zillions of words that have "th/ss" sound. If you change the spelling of the Latin American Spanish, then it so would be a different language.
> To be honest, sometimes, I like this "th" sound in Castillian because I find it rather Spanish  but some other times, I just find it very annoying


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## Outsider

avok said:
			
		

> I don't understand why French and Portuguese don't include "ç" in their alphabets as a separate letter.


I don't understand why we should. Since our alphabet was invented, the letters have been A, B, C, D... the basic building blocks of words. To these, we sometimes add little diacritcs, for whatever purpose. "Ç" is composed of the letter "C" plus a cedilla, so we don't see it as a letter in itself. It's a complex character composed of a letter combined with a diacritic. 

Anyway, at least this is how we see it here in western Europe.



			
				avok said:
			
		

> So.....the "z" sound had been pronounced as "ss/th" before "ç" became "ss/th"


They both came to be pronounced as "ss" or "th" in Spanish at about the same time. The medieval pronunciation of "z" was probably [dz], the voiced counterpart of "c/ç" [ts]. The Spanish sibilants lost all the voiced-voiceless contrasts in the modern age.


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## JGreco

There is lots of confusion with word spelling and pronunciation with related words in Spanish for example with the word "casar" which in both pronunciations in Spaniard Castellano and Latin American means "to marry" but the word "cazar" which means "to hunt" is pronounced exactly like "casar" is in Latin American Castellano but in Spain the pronunciation is "cah-thar" which is confusing for many Spaniards to here it pronounced the Latin American pronunciation. If "cazar" was spelled "cassar" in Latin American Castellano to reflect pronunciation it would retain the original "cazar" pronunciation in Spain. Same thing for the word "cocer" and "coser" (cook and sew in English) changing "cocer" to "cosser or coçer" in Latin American Castellano to reflect pronunciation. There are many many more words in Castellano that are like this and they've have done language reforms in English and Portuguese to reflect change in pronunciation and usage of words in those languages and they are still essentially English and Portuguese no matter where it is spoken why can't they do this in Castellano?


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## Frank06

*Hello everybody,

It's not bad to look at the title of the thread once in a while. It clearly states "La cedilla (ç)". The topic of this thread is -- and I quote from the first post -- the "letter (C with a diacritical mark)". Letters are not sounds.

This thread is closed.

Groetjes

Frank
Moderator EHL*


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