in 1632. An
e caudata appears in the words
Sacrę,
propagandę,
prædictę, and
grammaticę (alongside the form
grammaticæ). The typographic
e caudata was adopted during the Renaissance from the much older manuscript
e caudata (as in
The Song of Roland). 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 ("
e with a tail", also called "tailed e"). It more or less frequently replaces the Latin
digraph ae (often written as the
ligature æ, a convention that later spread more widely). This digraph generally represented an open (originally long, until distinctions of
vowel length disappeared), 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 (with an
ogonek) or
ȩ (with a cedilla), has been preserved in
Romance philological transcription, whereas the digraph
ae (in its ligatured form
æ, known as
ash) 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 (1854), "manuscripts in which one finds the
e cedilla rather than
œ must be placed between five and seven hundred years ago ", that is, between 1150 and 1350: "Tory proposed writing with a cedilla the penultimate
e of the third person plural of the perfect tense of verbs of the third conjugation (
emere,
contendere, etc.) 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 (with printing privilege dated ). 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. 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 (for example, he wrote
invanţion). 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/: Moreover, it would have been possible to write the words
lança and
français using the letter
s, since the phoneme /ts/ no longer existed at the time of the
borrowing of the cedilla. The
phoneme had even merged with the other /s/ sounds. However, it was the visual and etymologizing appearance of the word that prevailed. The spelling
*lansa would have introduced an awkward alternation:
*il lansa ~
ils lancèrent. In other languages, such as Spanish, the spelling of a conjugated verb may be inconsistent: one now writes
lanzar, thus "cutting oneself off" from the Latin etymology
lanceare, which was more explicitly reflected in
lançar (though it reappears in alternation with
lance in the present
subjunctive). In addition to maintaining visual etymological coherence, the cedilla also makes it possible, in certain cases, to resolve spelling problems for the sound /s/ derived from /k/. For example,
reçu retains a link with
recevoir, but above all could not be written in any other way:
*resu would be read /ʁəzy/ and
*ressu /resy/. The same applies to
leçon and other words in which a
schwa is followed by the phoneme /s/. In other cases, plain
c without a cedilla is retained. The retention of
c in such words is explained by an orthographic
archaism: the Latin or French
etymon remains visible, allowing greater visual coherence by preserving a link between the cedilla-marked
derived form and the
root from which it originates. In this way,
lança and
lançons remain clearly and visually connected to the root
lanc- /lɑ̃s/ of
lancer,
lance, etc. Likewise,
reçu retains a link with
recevoir. Conversely, when the sound /k/ must be obtained before the graphic vowels
e,
i, and
y, a
u is used as a diacritic letter following
c:
accueil. Used as a diacritic detached from its original
c, the cedilla was extended to other letters in other languages from the 19th century onward.
Chronology of the appearance of the cedilla • Before the 9th century, occurrences of the Visigothic cedilla (ʒ), which was shortened to
ç in the 11th century. • In parallel, the palaeographic
e cedilla (e caudata) is attested as early as the 6th century. • 9th century –
Cantilène de sainte Eulalie: a
hapax of the diacritic
z, intended to be shortened to
ç, appears in the form
czo. • 1480 – Birth of
Geoffroy Tory in
Bourges. • Before 1500 – Spanish and Portuguese printers create
typefaces for the cedilla; these enter France via
Toulouse. • 1509 – Tory innovates in Latin printing (cedillas on the
e of the verbs
emere,
contendere). • 1529 (completed in 1526) – Tory argues for the introduction of the cedilla into French in
Champ fleury. • Early 1530 – Tory introduces the cedilla in
Le sacre et le coronnement de la Royne, imprime par le commandement du Roy nostre Sire. • June 7, 1533 – Publication of the fourth edition of ''L'Adolescence clémentine'' by Tory, representing a major dissemination of the cedilla. • October 1533 – Death of Geoffroy Tory. • 18th century – The cedilla disappears from Spanish; it is used by all printers in France. Nicolas Beauzée proposes its generalization in place of
s. Numerous spelling reform attempts follow: some call for abandoning the cedilla, others for generalizing it. However, this diacritic, successfully established by Tory shortly before his death in 1533, has retained essentially the same rules of use down to the present day.
Etymology Although the cedilla appeared in French
manuscripts as early as the 9th century and in French
printing from 1530 onward, the word
cédille itself is attested only in 1611, in the altered form
cerille, and then as
cédille in 1654–1655. The word
cerilla had, however, already been borrowed from
Spanish in 1492, and the form
cedilla is attested in 1558. In Spanish,
cedilla means "little z" and is the diminutive of the name of the letter
z in Spanish,
zeda (now obsolete, like
ceda; the current name being
zeta), itself derived from the Latin
zeta, from Greek
zêta, "the sixth letter of the
Greek alphabet". Greek
zêta is itself "borrowed from
Phoenician (cf.
Hebrew zajit,
Arabic zayn)". and later in his
Œuvres, the term
cedilla was mistakenly interpreted by
Dumarsais in French as meaning "little c" rather than "little z", due to the shape of the cedilla: == Current usage ==