Ç

Evolution from Visigoth to modern Ç.

Ç or ç (c-cedilla) is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish and Zazaki alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include French, Friulian, Ligurian, Occitan, Portuguese and Catalan as a variant of the letter C. It is also occasionally used in Crimean Tatar, and in Tajik when written in the Latin script to represent the /ʤ/ sound. It is often retained in the spelling of loanwords from any of these languages in English, Dutch, Spanish, Basque, and other Latin script spelled languages.

It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /t͡s/ in Old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter z (Ꝣ). The phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives /t/ and /k/ in some conditions. Later, /t͡s/ changed into /s/ in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used the symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century (which replaced ç with the now-devoiced z), but it was adopted for writing other languages.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ç represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

Usage as a letter variant in various languages

Unless otherwise specified, in the following languages, ç represents the "soft" sound /s/ where a c would normally represent the "hard" sound /k/.

  • Catalan. Known as ce trencada (that is, "broken C") in this language, where it can be used before a, o, u or at the end of a word. Some examples of words with ç are amenaça "menace", torçat "twisted", xoriço "chorizo", forçut "strong", dolç "sweet" and caça "hunting". A well-known word with this character is Barça, a common Catalan diminutive for FC Barcelona, also used across the world, including the Portuguese and Spanish-language media.
  • French (cé cédille): français "French", garçon "boy", façade "frontage", grinçant "squeaking", leçon "lesson", reçu "received" (past participle). French does not use the character at the end of a word but it can occur at the beginning of a word (ça "that").[1]
  • Friulian (c cun cedilie): it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/ before a, o, u or at the end of a word.
  • Occitan (ce cedilha): torçut "twisted", çò "this", ça que la "nevertheless", braç "arm", brèç "cradle", voraç "voracious". It can occur at the beginning of a word.
  • Portuguese (cê-cedilha or cê cedilhado): it is used before a, o, or u: taça "cup", braço "arm", açúcar "sugar". Modern Portuguese does not use the character at the beginning or at the end of a word (the nickname for Conceição is São, not Ção).
  • Manx: it is used in the digraph çh, pronounced [t͡ʃ], to differentiate it from normal ch, pronounced [x].

In loanwords only

  • In English and Basque, ç (known as ze hautsia in Basque) is used in loanwords such as façade and limaçon (although the cedilla mark is often dropped in English: facade, limacon).
  • In modern Spanish it can appear in loanwords, especially in Catalan proper nouns.
  • In Dutch, it can be found in some words from French and Portuguese, such as façade, reçu, Provençaals and Curaçao.

Usage as a separate letter in various languages

It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/ in the following languages:

It previously represented a voiceless palatal click /ǂ/ in Juǀʼhoansi and Naro, though the former has replaced it with ⟨ǂ⟩ and the latter with ⟨tc⟩.

The similarly-shaped letter the (Ҫ ҫ) is used in the Cyrillic alphabets of Bashkir and Chuvash to represent /θ/ and /ɕ/ respectively.

Computer

CharacterÇç
Unicode nameLATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLALATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
Encodingsdecimalhexdecimalhex
Unicode199U+00C7231U+00E7
UTF-8195 135C3 87195 167C3 A7
Numeric character referenceÇÇçç
Named character referenceÇç

Input

On Albanian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Italian keyboards, Ç is directly available as a separate key; however, on most other keyboards, including the US/British keyboard, a combination of keys must be used:

See also

References

  1. ↑ The French Academy online dictionary also gives çà and çûdra.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.