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If you've been paying attention, you've already noticed that the C in my last name looks like it's leaking something... alphabet soup, perhaps?
My C's suspicious squiggle, my friend, is its cedilha in Portuguese, its cédille in French, or its cedilla--originally in Spanish but now English as well.
What is a Cedilla?
The cedilla is a unique diacritic mark (colloquially: "accent"). One thing that makes it unusual is that it is applied only to the letter C. This should serve as a clue that something weird is going on.
It’s also a little strange that we know it by its Spanish name, because they don't use it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
On the surface, Ç doesn't seem that complicated. It's just the Roman letter C with a little hook-mark beneath it, isn't it?
Duh, no.
What does it do?
In English it makes you look clever when you use it in a select few French loanwords such as façade and soupçon. In these cases the cédille instructs francophones and francophiles to soften the C, pronouncing it like an S. That means we should pronounce façade as “fahSAHD” rather than “fahKAHD” and soupçon like “sooSOHN,” not “sooKOHN.”
The Portuguese call it a cedilha, and in Portuguese it has the same essing function as the cédille, and that's why my Portuguese surname, Gonçalves, is pronounced gonSALLvess, not GONkalvz (a good name for an inattentive cowboy).
What's does "cedilla" mean?
The word "cedilla" comes from Old Spanish "zedilla," with "zed” meaning "the letter Z" and “illa” being a feminine diminutive Spanish suffix. In other words, the cedilla is a “little girly Z.”
Little Girly z?
At first I didn’t see it, but then I read that it is supposedly a cursive Z. If you include the finishing stroke of the C as the starting stroke of a z, well, maybe...
I'll allow it.
But my knee-jerk response is that if the cedilla is a distinct diacritic mark, then including part of the C is cheating... or a major stretch at best.
Perhaps the Old Spanish imagination was fueled by the fact that, back when they actually used it, Ç was pronounced like a Z (for reasons which we will get to).
Eventually, the Spanish got sick and tired of having to make excuses for why their C sometimes had a little girly Z stuck on its bum, so they formally replaced Ç with Z during a century of orthographic reforms beginning in the 17th centuries.
This meant that Old Spanish names like Gonçales morphed into Gonzalez. The Portuguese were fine with this idiosyncratic symbol, and my ancestors retained Gonçalves.
Meanwhile, cedilla had already made it into English, and that's why today we use a Spanish name for a diacritic mark that is not actually used in Spanish.
One of my Portuguese progenitors once told me...
The cedilha is not a mini-girly-z. It is in fact a miniature S.
A Québecoise I spoke with recently confirmed that in French the cédille is indeed a little S, and this fact is taught in school.
Let's look at it again:
I see it!
This alleged mini-S tells the Portuguese and French to pronounce the C like an S in circumstances in which it would normally be pronounced as a hard C.
This makes complete sense because it does look kind of like a hasty S. Plus, signaling S-ness is its job!
OK now we seem to be on track.
As usual, Everybody is wrong.
It turns out Ç is not a C with little girly z underneath. Nor is it a C with a hasty S underneath.
It turns out, the cedilla isn't even a diacritic mark!
The whole and entire Ç
The C-cedilla as a unit - Ç - is actually a time-worn bastardization of the lowercase Visigoth letter zet, the last letter of the Visigoth alphabet.
zet
Zet Romanized, Over Time...
Little girly z coming through!
That's Right
Zet was the Visigothic lowercase Z (interestingly, their uppercase Z was "Z").
When you look at as pictured above, the little girly z really does come out. But zet was a letter of many faces, pronounced throughout Europe in a variety of ways: for example like an English z , s, th, or d.
Side Note
As a Gonçalves born in America, I have spent A LOT of time correcting people regarding both the pronunciation and spelling of my name. I have often wished the Portuguese had changed Ç to S as the Spanish had to Z.
Certain aspects of my life would have been easier, but then again I never would have learned that I am descended from a Visigoth Battle Elf!
The French and Portuguese of Old pronounced zet like S, just as they pronounce Ç today. I think it makes sense because--you have to admit--zet kinda looks like someone sneezed while writing an S.
Geseuntheit!
Clearly the Portuguese and French were just making things up to try make sense of their languages (LOL good f@$%ing luck with French) which were inundated with words from their Visigoth conquerors. No, the cedilha/cédille, was definitely NOT a little S whispering in little French and Portuguese ears.
But were the Spanish any more correct? It certainly seems that replacing zet with z was appropriate, but the Spanish were clearly hallucinating: The cedilla is not a little z under a C. It's not even a thing.
But we mustn't lose sight of the fact that the Vizigoth character zet, as pictured, is literally their alphabet's LITTLE Z. I believe that "Cedilla" was not originally a reference to the diacritic mark, it was an explanation of the whole character ç.
It seems to me that the cedilla is a socio-orthographic inkblot, where we are inclined to see what we have been preconditioned to see, and our observations are substantiated by our culture's prevailing language myths.
Cedilla / Cedilha / Cédille
Credit For the Original Name Goes to ....
SPANISH.
The Portuguese cedilha and French cédille are clearly imports of the Spanish neologism, cedilla. Why do I say this? Because the Portuguese diminutive suffixes are (-inha, -inho, -zinha, and -zinho) and the French diminutives are (-ette, -et, -ou, -on, and -od). Arguably, if the Portuguese had named the cedilha according to their interpretation, it would be an eszinha, and the French version would likely be an essette.
Obviously, both the French and the Portuguese imported the Spanish word cedilla and created native spellings that would sound roughly the same as the original Spanish word, without understanding or regard for the contradictory Spanish etymology.
Disagree? Fight me, but remember: hot Visigothic Battle Elf blood courses through my veins!
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