The letter (sometimes called sho or san) was a letter added to the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as w ...

in order to write the Bactrian language.Everson, M. and Sims-Williams, N. (2002) �
Proposal to add two Greek letters for Bactrian to the UCS
��，ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2411. It was similar in appearance to the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic letter thorn (þ), which has typically been used to represent it in modern print, although both are historically quite unrelated. It probably represented a sound similar to English "sh" (). Its conventional transliteration in Latin is . KanishkaCoin3

Its original name and position in the Bactrian alphabet, if it had any, are unknown. Some authors have called it "san", on the basis of the hypothesis that it was a survival or reintroduction of the archaic Greek letter San. This letter closely resembles, perhaps coincidentally, the letter of the Greek-based

Carian alphabet The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. They consisted of some 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile ...

which may have also stood for . The name "sho" was coined for the letter for purposes of modern computer encoding in 2002, on the basis of analogy with "rho" (), the letter with which it seems to be graphically related. Ϸ was added to

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

in version 4.0 (2003), in an uppercase and lowercase character designed for modern typography.

Other representations of in the Greek alphabet

The modern Cypriot Greek dialect also has an sound, but it is represented with the combining caron , by the authors of th
"Syntychies" lexicographic database
at the University of Cyprus, e.g. " mashallah". When diacritics are not used, an epenthetic —often accompanied by the systematic substitution of the preceding consonant letter—may be used to the same effect, e.g. Standard

Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...

→ Cypriot Greek . The Tsakonian language, considered a Hellenic language or a very divergent dialect of Greek, has a sound. It is spelled or, in

Thanasis Costakis Thanasis Costakis ( el, Θανάσης Κωστάκης, 1907–2009) was a Greek linguist and lexicographer best known for his work on the now-moribund Tsakonian language spoken in the eastern Peloponnese. Costakis was born in Pera Melana in ...

' orthography, .

References

* Greek letters Bactrian language 1st-century introductions 9th-century endings {{writingsystem-stub