Esh (letter)

Esh (majuscule: Ʃ, minuscule: ʃ) is a character used in phonology to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English ⟨sh⟩, as in "ship").

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Quick facts Usage, Writing system ...

In Unicode, these letters are encoded as U+01A9 Ʃ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ESH and U+0283 ʃ LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH

Its lowercase form ⟨ʃ⟩ is similar to an integral sign ⟨∫⟩ or a long s ⟨ſ⟩ with an extra leftward hook at the bottom; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter sigma for the uppercase form ⟨Ʃ⟩. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English sh). It is not common around African languages, but it is, in fact, used in some, for example, Serer uses its lowercase form to make the [ʄ] consonant. This letter is used as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses U+0283 ʃ LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH to represent a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant. Related obsolete IPA characters include U+01AA ƪ LATIN LETTER REVERSED ESH LOOP, U+0285 ʅ LATIN SMALL LETTER SQUAT REVERSED ESH, and U+0286 ʆ LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH CURL.

U+AB4D ꭍ LATIN SMALL LETTER BASELINE ESH is used in the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system.^[1]

Variations of esh are used for other phonetic transcription:^[2] ⟨ᶋ⟩, ⟨ᶘ⟩, ⟨^ʃ⟩.

U+1DF0B 𝼋 LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH DOUBLE BAR and U+1DF0C 𝼌 LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH DOUBLE BAR AND CURL are used as click letters.^[3]^[4]

Form, usage, and history

See also

References

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