> I have never seen a detached cedilla in a serif font (in French).

I am sure I have never seen a French text typeset in Goudy Old Style. Here is how that looks on my mac:

For me, that one looks quite weird; I can't see that thing under the c as a cedilla, I see it a comma even if the only possible diacritic under a c in French is a cedilla. As for Eurostyle or Futura, I see no problem; their detached and unadorned cedilla allows a much larger freedom of interpretation.

By the way, if you are on a Mac and use "Show character palette", View: Roman, Accented Latin and click on the ç on the right, you will see all the ccedillas of all the fonts installed on you mac in the bottom pannel; I was surprised by Adobe's Rosewood ccedilla.

Michel

You mean Goudy Old Style's comma? Here it is with the cedillas.

At that size, things seem to look better.

By the way, in his book The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books: from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century, Albert Derolez describes on page 173 a script he calls "Iberian Hybrida" (a gothic script used in Spain and Portugal) saying

Iberian Hybrida is also marked by the form of the c caudata (ç, which was used as an alternative to z): the cedilla was placed well below the baseline and is unconnected to the c (26)

And here is figure 26:

Michel

The last issue (March 2009) of Paulo Heitlinger's Cardernos de Tipografia e Design is devoted in a large part to his font Escolar uma fonte contemporânea para aprender a escrever e ler to be used in primary school to learn reading and writing. There are two versions of that font, one for Portugal, one for Brasil, and amongst the differences there is... guess what... the c cedilla. And here is a grab of his pdf:

Can someone tell me how they teach children to write cedillas in Brasil? :)

Michel

Cedillas are teached the same way in both countries.

How do you know? There are slides from Florian Hardwig's manuscribe project that show that the way children are taught to write letters can vary a lot from country to country.

What you just showed us is just wrong.

The question here is not what is right and what is wrong but what is true and what is false. Is the statement "Some (many?) schools in Portugal teach children to draw cedillas as in the font Escolar Portugal true or false? The above grab of "Escolar Portugal" corresponds to the glifos + exemplos (pdf 280 K) on the font site. The answer needs to be yes or no, not right or wrong.

The question here is not what is right and what is wrong but what is true and what is false. Is the statement “Some (many?) schools in Portugal teach children to draw cedillas as in the font Escolar Portugal true or false? The above grab of “Escolar Portugal” corresponds to the glifos + exemplos (pdf 280 K) on the font site. The answer needs to be yes or no, not right or wrong.

There isn't much of a question here, really. lula_assasina's right too - the portuguese language has not adopted undercommas, only cedillas. If, by definition, cedillas connect to the character, then it seems pretty clear that the cedilla should, well, actually connect to the character. The fact that typefaces might be designed without that concern hardly means they're not wrong.

Anyway, I'm familiar with the teaching methods for the early stages in portuguese education and can say that we do teach our kids to write connected cedillas, so it's a yes to your question.

How do you know?

By asking a Brazilian primary school teacher who gave classes in both countries. Hook connected with a stroke to the bottom of the "c". At least, that's the way they teach future teachers. :)

Undercommas appeared in the Buda Lexicon, in Romania, 1825, in order resolve in graphya Romanian missing sounds.

Let me also be clear on one thing. If undercommas appeared in 1825, then they could not exist in 1482. Now, here is a font that was used in the Ratdolt 1482 edition of Elementa Geometriae by Euclid and that corresponds to the link Typ.1:109R (from the preceding link).

Consequently the glyph that is at the right of the c in Ratdolt's font cannot be that a "c undercomma".

Michel

Ah, better archives you got there!
Re-checked and Buda Lexicon has the proposition to include undercommas in the letters "s" and "t" in Romanian.

Then again, they still have different origins.

Consequently the glyph that is at the right of the c in Ratdolt’s font cannot be that a “c undercomma”.

Mind your sarcasm, you don't need it, since you find enough proofs to be right.

Thanks for the great investigation again, Michel.

Thanks for the great investigation again, Michel.

Welcome. I had other interesting things but I don't know where I put them. I have at least this link http://www.danteonline.it/english/codici_indice.htm where can be found manuscripts of Dante's Divine Comedy dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first words "Nel mezzo" are sometimes written "Nel meçço", or "Nel meço" and the cedilla can take a wide variety of shapes. Here is a grab from the first page of this manuscript; look at the cedilla in red and the two in the word mezzo!

It seems that printing had a normalizing influence on Italian spelling. I could not find a single cedilla in incunabila of the Divine Comedy (but maybe I did not search hard enough...)

Michel

Maybe it doesn’t have enough resolution to be clear.

It would be nice to have access to one of the high resolution versions. In the word bençã[o] above, it is hard to believe that there is ink between the c and the black diacritic. Is it possible the titling was attached and the regular detached? Else I would imagine an extremely fine line that would be beautiful in digital type but that would probably print with difficulty if the metal character is not melted properly.

Michel

I found the files I was looking for. The cedillas come from a hand written text (in Spanish). The source is "Documents of the Hispanic Southwest: The Expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado 1540-1542", Jerry R. Craddock (pdf 9.8MB). The document is concerned with palaeography and displays some fantastic cedillas. Here are a few grabs.

Michel

Edit: I should have said the hand-written text that is studied in Craddock's article is "Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla. Justicia 267, fol. 814r".

I found a better scan of the grammar (pdf 5.8MB). Here is what I get for the above grab (this time on page 30 on 124 of the pdf file instead of page 13v).

The attachment I had imagined on the first c does not seem to be there; it is just the c that seems to have been more inked. On the other hand, the attachment on the e is clearly there and there seems to be no problem with any of the "e caudata". It is now my feeling the cedilla is not attached in that font.

Michel

That visigothic "z" appears to be taken from this manuscript:

I'm having a hard time to find one like in the wiki.

Michel, in modern Portuguese those two passages can be written as,

E assim temos esta letra ç, que parece ser inventada para pronunciação Hebraica ou Mourisca

and

Nos parece que houvemos estas letras dos mouriscos que vencemos

which would be translated into something like,

And here we have this letter ç, that seems like it was invented for the Hebrew and Moorish pronunciation

and

It looks to us that we gained these letters from the Moorish that we've defeated

I was also wondering if the word "assy" could not correspond to the modern French "aussi" (also) instead of the modern Portuguese "assim". Unfortunately, the pdf is not searchable and I could not check if the word "também" figures elsewhere in the file.

As I was perusing through the pages I noticed these few lines in leaf 25 recto

It was interesting to see the ſs ligature used along with the ſſ ligature.

Just now I saw this thread. As a Brazilian, let me add some information.

As said above, cedilla is the only diacritic you find below a character in Portuguese. It's also used just with /c/ in /ça/ço/çu/ combinations. And it never begins a word. Besides this, our contact with Romanian and Turkish cultures are almost none, so Brazilians doesn't know there is a thing like commaccent.

Almost anything you put bellow a /c/ will be easily read as a cedilla in Brazilian Portuguese. It may be a cedilla, a commaccent, a straight line, an acute... all this will work because there is no other diacritic to be confused with cedilla. And also because cedilla usage, although common, is very specific.

Scholars learn to wrote cedilla as an upside-down hook.

To design and use disconnected cedillas is not an issue to Brazilians. But this is not a trend in Portuguese. It's just a variation in cedilla shape made possible due to local language and culture (I believe the same applies to Portugal). In other hand, disconnected cedillas in a traditional serif font may seem strange nowadays. Even if this was not unusual in 15th and 16th Centuries, later it seems to be changed to an always-connected-shape. Remember that Portuguese is a relatively new language if compared to other Romance ones. Its consolidation came just in late 1400s/early 1500s.

And, of course, many people may use wrong cedillas due to lack of knowledge about the commaccent existence. The book 'Ação de cobrança' cited above is a good example. I'm sure its editors have no idea they're using a commaccent-like cedilla, especially considering it's a Law book (Law books are usually badly designed here).

But if one designs a font with international support, both cedilla and commaccent clearly distinguished. The designer may even adopt a disconnected cedilla if this is suitable to general font style – but this cedilla still needs to by clearly different than a commaccent. A 'multi-purpose' diacritic seems not acceptable.

Finally, for me it's quite obvious that if one must observe the correct position and shape of other diacritics, as ogoneks, exactly the same applies to cedillas. Graphical similarity and some circumstantial wrong usage does not justify a font to mix up cedilla and commaccent.