Sha or Shu (Ш ш; italics:
''Ш ш'') is a letter of the
Glagolitic
The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...
and
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...
scripts. It commonly represents the
voiceless postalveolar fricative
A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voiceless ...
. More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is commonly transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative but is actually a
voiceless retroflex fricative. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet for
Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
In English, Sha is
romanized
Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...
as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of
Czech,
Slovak,
Slovene,
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
,
Macedonian
Macedonian most often refers to someone or something from or related to Macedonia.
Macedonian(s) may specifically refer to:
People Modern
* Macedonians (ethnic group), a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group primarily associated with North Ma ...
,
Latvian and
Lithuanian.
History
Sha has its earliest origins in
Phoenician Shin and is possibly linked closely to Shin's
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
equivalent:
Sigma
Sigma (; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; grc-gre, σίγμα) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used a ...
(Σ, σ, ς). (The similar form of the modern
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
Shin (ש), which is probably where the Cyrillic letter was actually derived from, derives from the same
Proto-Canaanite
Proto-Canaanite is the name given to
:(a) the Proto-Sinaitic script when found in Canaan, dating to about the 17th century BC and later.
:(b) a hypothetical ancestor of the Phoenician script before some cut-off date, typically 1050 BCE, with an u ...
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 also a possibility that Sha was taken from the
Coptic alphabet
The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian ...
, 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
Shcha (Щ щ; italics: ), Shta or Sha with descender is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative , similar to the pronunciation of in ''sheep'' (but longer). In Ukrainian and Rusy ...
(Щ, щ) in appearance.
Use in mathematics
The Cyrillic letter Ш is internationally used in mathematics for several concepts:
In
algebraic geometry
Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics, classically studying zeros of multivariate polynomials. Modern algebraic geometry is based on the use of abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, for solving geometrical ...
, the
Tate–Shafarevich group In arithmetic geometry, the Tate–Shafarevich group of an abelian variety (or more generally a group scheme) defined over a number field consists of the elements of the Weil–Châtelet group that become trivial in all of the completions of ...
of an
Abelian variety
In mathematics, particularly in algebraic geometry, complex analysis and algebraic number theory, an abelian variety is a projective algebraic variety that is also an algebraic group, i.e., has a group law that can be defined by regular functi ...
''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
In mathematics, a Dirac comb (also known as shah function, impulse train or sampling function) is a periodic function with the formula
\operatorname_(t) \ := \sum_^ \delta(t - k T)
for some given period T. Here ''t'' is a real variable and th ...
.
The
shuffle product In mathematics, a shuffle algebra is a Hopf algebra with a basis corresponding to words on some set, whose product is given by the shuffle product ''X'' ⧢ ''Y'' of two words ''X'', ''Y'': the sum of all ways of interlacing them. The interlacing i ...
is often denoted by ш.
Related letters
*ش :
Arabic letter Shin/Sin
*Ⱎ :
Glagolitic letter Sha/ša
*Ⱋ :
Glagolitic letter Shta/šta or Shcha/šča
*Щ щ :
Cyrillic letter Shcha
*⧢ :
Shuffle product In mathematics, a shuffle algebra is a Hopf algebra with a basis corresponding to words on some set, whose product is given by the shuffle product ''X'' ⧢ ''Y'' of two words ''X'', ''Y'': the sum of all ways of interlacing them. The interlacing i ...
*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
References
External links
*
*{{Wiktionary-inline, ш