The C-cedilla was originally created for the Spanish language (strictly
speaking, for the Aragonese, or Castillian language). That language had
six sibilants, which were written with c, ç, j, s, x and z. During
the Christian reconquest of Iberia (from the Moslems), the Castillian
language lost many of its voiced sibilants (the standard hypothesis is that
this was the influence of Basque, which also is sibilant-poor, since a large
fraction of the soldiers of the reconquest were Basque). At this point,
Modern Spanish (i.e. New Castillian) has more sibilant alphabetic
characters than it has sibilant sounds for them to represent, so it surely
doesn't need the cedilla. In the original ``Don Quixote,'' the x was
pronounced like English sh
, and Sancho Panza was written Sancho
``Pança.''