Cedilla
The cedilla is a diacritic of the Latin alphabet. In French, it is used only under the letter C, both in uppercase and lowercase forms: Ç, ç.
It is also used in several other languages under different letters. It bears a visual resemblance to the numeral 5 with its upper stroke removed.
Historically, the Spanish cedilla was placed only under a c derived, among other possibilities, from a Latin c that had undergone palatalization. It then formed the letter ç, originally pronounced /ts/ and later /s/.
History
The modern grapheme of the cedilla derives from medieval Gothic script or Visigothic script. 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".Under the letter c, the handwritten cedilla developed through three successive forms: a diacritic z, then a z with a cedilla, and finally the modern c with cedilla. By contrast, the evolution of the e caudata is considered unrelated to that of the cedilla.
In manuscripts
''C with cedilla''
The palatal phoneme /ts/ of the Romance languages derives from a Latin /k/ c that was palatalized and then assibilated. Before vowels that would otherwise trigger a non-palatalized pronunciation, scribes used various spellings to indicate the "new" pronunciation: simply c, ce, or cz.Thus ceo and czo were read /tso/: the diacritic e and z prevented the reading /ko/.
This latter notation appears in French as early as the first literary manuscript in the French language, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, where it occurs only once, in verse 21.
According to Greimas, the neuter demonstrative ço appears in the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
However, Greimas gives only the form ço 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, analyzes the form czo as follows:
The z in czo is thus interpreted as a diacritic z which, once placed beneath the c, would become the cedilla.
The Visigothic script is indeed thought to have abbreviated this grapheme around the 11th century in Spain. Initially, the c was written above the z in its form ʒ; later, the c regained its full size while was reduced to a subscript sign. Thus, the Spanish word lanʒa /lantsa/ came to be written lança. The usefulness of such a sign, and an early attempt to systematize the notation of /ts/, led to the extension of the cedilla before the vowels i and e. This was later regarded as a form of hypercorrection, since c alone was sufficient.
Maria Selig confirms this Visigothic origin:
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 to Jean 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 of c ".
Accordingly, in the manuscripts of The Song of Roland, the cedilla is not used, although modern transcriptions add it for ease of reading.
Paleographic cedilled ''e'' (''e caudata'')
A form resembling a cedilla can therefore be found beneath the letter e in medieval manuscripts, with usage attested as early as the 6th century in uncial script. The resulting letter is known as e caudata. It more or less frequently replaces the Latin digraph ae. This digraph generally represented an open , derived from the Classical Latin diphthong, which was monophthongized from the 2nd century onward.This usage continued in manuscripts until the 18th century but did not survive the advent of printing:
It is noteworthy that this letter, represented here as ę or ȩ, has been preserved in Romance philological transcription, whereas the digraph ae has been retained in the transcription of Germanic languages. ę was used in manuscripts of Old 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 letter z, and it more likely derives from a subscript a.
This cedilla-like mark, whose use varied before the spread of printing, can therefore serve as an indicator for the dating of manuscripts by palaeographers. For example, according to the Dictionnaire de paléographie by Louis Mas Latrie, "manuscripts in which one finds the cedilled e rather than œ must be placed between five and seven hundred years ago", that is, between 1150 and 1350:
Early printing
Manuscript usage was taken up in printing, first by Spanish and Portuguese printers, and then imitated by the French printer Geoffroy Tory. According to Auguste Bernard, as early as 1509, "Tory proposed writing with a cedilla the penultimate e of the third person plural of the perfect tense of verbs of the third conjugation in order to distinguish it from the infinitive," following the model already used shortly before 1509 in the Psalterium 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 of c-cedilla, was first explicitly advocated in 1529 by the same author, in the introduction to his book , published in 1529.
Its subtitle clearly expresses its purpose: l'art et la science de la due et vraie proportion de la lettre. This work is, moreover, the first typographical treatise written in French:
This defense of the cedilla was not immediately put into practice. In Tory's system, the cedilla was intended to mark /s/. The cedilla formed part of Geoffroy Tory's typographical innovations, 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 in Le sacre et coronnement de la royne by Guillaume Bochetel, published in 1531.
According to many authors, Tory generalized the use of c-cedilla in his edition of L'Adolescence Clémentine by Clément 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.
In reality, Tory had already introduced the cedilla at the beginning of 1530 in his pamphlet Le sacre et le coronnement de la Royne, imprime par le commandement du Roy nostre Sire, where it appears three times, in the words façon, commença, and Luçon.
The 1533 edition of L'Adolescence Clémentine nevertheless represents the first true generalization of the cedilla in a work that enjoyed success and was intended for a relatively large print run for the period. Tory justified the use of the cedilla in the introduction to this edition using the same arguments already advanced in Champ fleury:
The practical application of Tory's orthographic system is irregular: apostrophes are missing in par faulte dadvis, and oddly placed in combien 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.
From this point onward, the cedilla was adopted by all printers. Before this, supporters of etymological orthography wrote francoys. Usage initially remained unstable. For example, in the Œuvres poétiques of Louise Labé, one finds the cedilla in aperçu but not in perſa, which is instead written with an s to avoid perca.
From there, the use of the "c with a tail" spread throughout France, but it was not until the 17th century that its use became truly common.
In Spanish, the cedilla was abandoned in the 18th century, while /ts/ had simplified to /s/ between the 14th and 16th centuries and then to /θ/ in the 17th century. Other related languages nevertheless retained it.
After the Renaissance
The introduction 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 letter c. Indeed, when c precedes a, o, or u, 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 the etymon and with derived forms or related forms.For Albert 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 ". The cedilla therefore became a stake in the many projects for orthographic reform of the French language.
T-cedilla in French
With regard to these attempts at orthographic reform, the history of the t-cedilla in French is exemplary.In 1663, in Rome la ridicule, Caprice by Saint-Amant, the printer and proofreader for the Elzeviers in Amsterdam, Simon Moinet, used the cedilla under the letter t in French.
In 1766,, preacher to the queen, proposed the use of the cedilla under t to distinguish cases where it is read /t/ from those where it is pronounced /s/:
Ambroise Firmin-Didot, in his Observations sur l'orthographe, ou ortografie, française, proposed to the Académie française a similar reform project aiming to introduce a t-cedilla, ţ, in words where t is pronounced /s/ before i. This would have eliminated a large number of irregularities in spelling. One would thus have written: les adopţions, pestilenciel, il différencie, il balbuţie.
In fact, as the author himself notes, the grammarians of Port-Royal had already proposed such an improvement before him. The project ultimately remained a dead letter.