Esh (letter)

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

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (May 2025) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the French article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,195 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Ʃ]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Ʃ}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This article needs additional citations for verification. (August 2014)

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

Wikiwand - on