Š

Š in upper- and lowercase

The grapheme Š, š (S with caron) is used in various contexts representing the sh sound usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative or similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with ʃ or ʂ, but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. It represents the same sound as the Turkic letter Ş and the Romanian letter Ș (S-comma).

For use in computer systems, Š and š are at Unicode codepoints U+0160 and U+0161 (Alt 0138 and Alt 0154 for input), respectively. In HTML code, the entities Š and š can also be used to represent the characters.

Primary usage

The symbol originates with the 15th-century Czech alphabet as introduced by the reforms of Jan Hus. From there, it was adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830, and other alphabets of languages such as Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Bosnian, Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian (as auxiliary alphabet), Montenegrin, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Karelian, Sami, Veps, Sorbian and some forms of Bulgarian. Some languages in this list also use the Cyrillic script where the "ш" represents the "š" in the Latin alphabet.

Also, š occurs in Finnish and Estonian, but only in loanwords. On occasion, it is possible to replace š with sh but only when it is technically impossible to typeset the accented character.[1]

Outside of Europe, the "š" is also used in Lakota, Cheyenne, and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree), and some African languages such as Northern Sotho and Songhay.

It is used in the Persian Latin alphabet, equivalent to ش.

Transliteration

The symbol is also used as the romanisation of Cyrillic ш in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration and deployed in the Latinic writing systems of Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bashkir.

In addition, the grapheme transliterates cuneiform orthography of Sumerian and Akkadian /ʃ/ or /t͡ʃ/, and (based on Akkadian orthography) the Hittite /s/ phoneme, as well as the /ʃ/ phoneme of Semitic languages, transliterating shin (Phoenician and its descendants), the direct predecessor of Cyrillic ш.

Computing code

CharacterŠš
Unicode nameLATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARONLATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
Encodingsdecimalhexdecimalhex
Unicode352U+0160353U+0161
UTF-8197 160C5 A0197 161C5 A1
Numeric character referenceŠŠšš
Named character referenceŠš

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Finnish orthography and the characters š and ž
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