Ç
Ç, ç (c-cedilla) is a letter of Albanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar, Kurdish language and Zaza language. This letter also appears in Portuguese, French, English, Occitan, Catalan and Friulian language as a variant of letter “c”.
It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter "z". This phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives /t/ and /k/ in some conditions. Later, /ts/ changed into /s/ in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used this symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century, 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
It represents the "soft" sound /s/ where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound /k/ (before "a", "o", "u", or at the end of a word), in the following languages:
- Catalan. Known as ce trencada (that is, "broken C") in this language. Some examples of words with "c"-cedilla are: torçut "twisted", ço "this", braç "arm", falç "sickle", voraç "voracious", caçar "to hunt", llançar "to throw". A well-known word with this character is Barça, a common Catalan diminutive for the F.C. Barcelona, one of Barcelona's football teams, also used across the world, including by the Spanish-language media.
- French (cé cédille). Examples: français "french", grinçant "squeaking", leçon "lesson", reçu "received" (past participle). French uses this character at the beginning of a word (ça "that"), but not at the end.[1] In French comic books that are hand-lettered in all-capitals, the cedilla is written as a slash crossing the center of the lower hook of the letter "C", at the angle of an acute accent. Also, the "ç" is used only in front of a, o and u letters. It is not needed in front of e, i and y.
- Manx. Used in the digraph "çh" pronounced [tʃ] to differentiate it from normal "ch" pronounced [x].
- Occitan (ce cedilha). Examples: torçut "twisted", çò "this", ça que la "nevertheless", braç "arm", brèç "cradle", voraç "voracious".
- Portuguese (cê cedilhado or cê de cedilha). Denotes unvoiced /s/ between vowels. Examples: taça "cup", braço "arm", açúcar "sugar", "coração" "heart". Modern Portuguese never uses this character at the beginning or at the end of a word.
- Spanish and Basque (before the 20th century)
- Friulian (c cun cedilie). It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/ before "a", "o", "u" or at the end of a word.
Usage as a separate letter in various languages
It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/ in the following languages:
- Albanian: the 4th letter of the Albanian alphabet.
- Azerbaijani: the 4th letter of the Azerbaijani alphabet.
- Kurdish: the 4th letter of the Kurdish Kurmanji alphabet.
- Zazaish:the 4th letter of the Zazaish alphabet.
- Tatar: the 5th letter of the Tatar alphabet (based on Zamanälif).
- Turkish: the 4th letter of the Turkish alphabet.
- Turkmen: the 3rd letter of the Turkmen alphabet.
Computer
| Charset | Unicode | ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 16 |
|---|---|---|
| Majuscule Ç | U+00C7 | C7 |
| Minuscule ç | U+00E7 | E7 |
For ASCII, type ALT + 128 for majuscule (Ç), and ALT + 135 for minuscule (ç). (Note: these ALT sequences are not an standard encoding, but a way to type these characters in Windows.)
Input
- In HTML character entity references
Çandçcan be used.
- In Windows XP, "Ç" can be produced using the shortcut key "ALT+0199" as "ç" can be produced using the shortcut key "ALT+0231".
References
- ^ The French Academy online dictionary also gives çà and çûdra.
