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Sha (Cyrillic)
Cyrillic letter From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sha, 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 often falsely 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]
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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, Latvian and Lithuanian.
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History
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.
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Usage
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.
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Use in mathematics
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
- ש : Hebrew letter ש
- 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
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Computing codes
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References
External links
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