Sha (Cyrillic)
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Sha, She or Shu, alternatively transliterated Ša (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/, like the pronunciation of sh in "ship". More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is commonly transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet for Slavic and non-Slavic languages. [citation needed]
In English, Sha is romanized as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
History
[edit]Sha has its earliest origins in Phoenician Shin and is possibly linked closely to Shin's Greek equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (The similar form of the modern Hebrew Shin (ש), which is probably where the Cyrillic letter was actually derived from, derives from the same Proto-Canaanite source). Sha already possessed its current form in Saints Cyril and Methodius's Glagolitic alphabet. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek, but as there was no Greek sign for the Sha sound (modern Greek uses simply "Σ/σ/ς" to spell the sh-sound in foreign words and names), Glagolitic Sha (Ⱎ) was adopted unchanged. There is also a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet, which is the same as the Greek alphabet but with a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" (Ϣϣ) which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance.
Usage
[edit]Sha is used in the alphabets of all Slavic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet, and of most non-Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The position in the alphabet and the sound represented by the letter vary from language to language.
Language | Position in
alphabet |
Represented sound | Romanization |
---|---|---|---|
Belarusian | 27th | voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ | sh |
Bulgarian | 25th | voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ | sh |
Macedonian | 31st | voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ | š or sh |
Russian | 26th | voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ | sh |
Serbian | 30th | voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ | š |
Ukrainian | 29th | voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ | sh |
Uzbek (1940–1994) | 20th | voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ | sh |
Mongolian | 28th | voiceless postalveolar affricate /ʃ/ | š |
Kazakh | 34th | voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕ/ | ş |
Kyrgyz | 29th | voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ | ş |
Dungan | 32nd | voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ | sh |
other non-Slavic languages | voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ |
Use in mathematics
[edit]The Cyrillic letter Ш is internationally used in mathematics for several concepts:
In algebraic geometry, the Tate–Shafarevich group of an Abelian variety A over a field K is denoted Ш(A/K), a notation first suggested by J. W. S. Cassels. (Previously it had been denoted TS.) Presumably the choice comes from the first letter of Шафаре́вич = Shafarevich.
In a different mathematical context, some authors allude to the shape of the letter Sha when they use the term Shah function for what is otherwise called a Dirac comb.
The shuffle product is often denoted by ш.[1]
Related letters
[edit]- ش : Arabic letter ش
- श: Devanagari letter श
- ष: Devanagari letter ष
- श़: Devanagari letter श़
- Ⱎ : Glagolitic letter Sha/ša
- Ⱋ : Glagolitic letter Shta/šta or Shcha/šča
- Щ щ : Cyrillic letter Shcha
- ⧢ : Shuffle product
- Ʃ ʃ : Latin letter Esh
- Š š : Latin letter S with caron
- Ŝ ŝ : Latin letter S with circumflex
- Ş ş : Latin letter S with cedilla
- Ș ș : Latin letter S with comma below
Computing codes
[edit]Preview | Ш | ш | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHA | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHA | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 1064 | U+0428 | 1096 | U+0448 |
UTF-8 | 208 168 | D0 A8 | 209 136 | D1 88 |
Numeric character reference | Ш |
Ш |
ш |
ш |
Named character reference | Ш | ш | ||
KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 251 | FB | 219 | DB |
Code page 855 | 246 | F6 | 245 | F5 |
Code page 866 | 152 | 98 | 232 | E8 |
Windows-1251 | 216 | D8 | 248 | F8 |
ISO-8859-5 | 200 | C8 | 232 | E8 |
Macintosh Cyrillic | 152 | 98 | 248 | F8 |