Sha

For other uses, see Sha (disambiguation).

Sha (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in "sheep", or the somewhat similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ in Russian. More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by <ш> is commonly transcribed as a palato-alveolar fricative but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative. 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, Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

History

Sha has its earliest origins in Phoenician Shin and is linked closely to Shin's Greek equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (Note the similar form of the modern Hebrew Shin (ש), which is probably the origin of this letter, deriving 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 was adopted unchanged. There is a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet, which was the same as the Greek alphabet but had a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance. It is also a three letter word that is Greek

Use in mathematics

Ш has the distinction of being the only^{[citation needed]} distinctly Cyrillic letter internationally used in mathematics:

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 unimaginatively denoted TS.)

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.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ш : Glagolitic letter Sha/ša
• Ⱋ : Glagolitic letter Shta/šta or Shcha/šča
• ש : Hebrew letter Shin/Sin
• Ɯ ɯ : Latin letter inverted M
• Ʃ ʃ : Latin letter Esh
• Š š : Latin letter S with caron
• Щ щ : Cyrillic letter Shcha

Computing codes

Character	Ш		ш
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHA		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHA
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	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
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

External links

• The dictionary definition of Ш at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of ш at Wiktionary