S-comma

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound , the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like ''sh'' in ''shoe'').

History

The letter was proposed in the ''Buda Lexicon'', a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, ''Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi'' and ''Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române'', introducing ș for and ț for .

Unicode support

S-comma was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250. Instead, Ş ( S- cedilla), a character available since Unicode 1.1.0 (1993), was used for digital texts written in Romanian. In some contexts, like with low-resolution screens and printouts, the visual distinction between ''ș'' and ''ş'' is minimal. In 1999, at the request of the , S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Microsoft Windows XP, but a later European Union Expansion Font Update provided the feature. While digital accessibility to S-comma has since improved, both characters continue to be used interchangeably in various contexts like publishing.

The letter is part of Unicode's Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", titled as "Latin capital letter S with comma below" (U+0218) and "Latin small letter s with comma below" (U+0219).Unicode code charts
Latin Extended-B: Range 0180–024F
/ref> In HTML, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

Use of the comma with the letter ''S''

*Romanian
**The Romanian letter (S with comma) represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in "show"). On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol ( S with cedilla) is used. Example word: .

Character encoding

See also

* Ş (S-cedilla)
* Š
* Ț (T-comma)
* D̦ (D-comma)

References

{{Latin script, S, comma

S-comma
S-comma