Re: Those darn curly subscripts (was: More orthographic miscellanea)

On Saturday, September 11, 2004, at 08:23 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Ray Brown wrote:
>
>
>>> The normative cedilla has a vertical descender
>>
>>
>> Normative? Who sets the norm? I must admit that most cedillas I've seen
>> have the stroke slanting thus /
>>
>> The word is Spanish for "zedlet" (or "zeelet"), i.e. little zed/zee. It
>> did begin its life as a small hand-written Z, something like ʒ, beneath
>> the C, so the slanting descender makes historical sense.
>>
>
> Actually the original "zedilla" was like an upside-down ʒ.
> The association with the third letter of the alphabet is
> secondary.
That's not what the sources I have at hand say.

Two things are certain:
1. _cedilla_ is a diminutive of _ceda_, Spanish for _zed/zee_ (spelled
_zedilla_ and _zeda_ in earlier Spanish), i.e. little Z.
2. The graphy _cz_ was used in Medieval Spanish to show that the |c| was
'soft' before |a, o, u| (Old French also occasionally used thus graphy,
but _ce_ was more common; both have noe given way to |ç| since the 16th
cent.) - the modern Spaniards just write |z|.

It is my understanding that the original _ce-zedila_ was exactly that: c
with a small z (written beneath it). I've checked my sources again today -
as far as I understand it, this is the origin of the cedilla/zedilla.

Ray
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"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004