Esh (
majuscule
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally '' majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing syste ...
: Ʃ,
minuscule: ʃ) is a character used in
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
to represent the
voiceless postalveolar fricative
A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some Speech, spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound #Voiceless palato-alveolar frica ...
(English , as in ''"ship"'').
In
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, these letters are encoded as and
Form, usage, and history
Its lowercase form is similar to an
integral sign or a
long s
The long s, , also known as the medial ''s'' or initial ''s'', is an Archaism, archaic form of the lowercase letter , found mostly in works from the late 8th to early 19th centuries. It replaced one or both of the letters ''s'' in a double-''s ...
with an extra leftward hook at the bottom; in 1928 the
Africa Alphabet borrowed the
Greek letter
sigma
Sigma ( ; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; ) 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 as an operator ...
for the uppercase form . The lowercase form was introduced by
Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English ''sh''). It is not common around African languages, but it is, in fact, used in some, for example,
Serer uses its lowercase form to make the [] consonant. This letter is used as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses to represent a Voiceless postalveolar fricative, voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant. Related
Obsolete and nonstandard symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet, obsolete IPA characters include , , and .
is used in the
Teuthonista
Teuthonista is a phonetic transcription system used predominantly for the transcription of High German languages, (High) German dialects. It is very similar to other Central European transcription systems from the early 20th century. The base cha ...
phonetic transcription system.
Variations of esh are used for other phonetic transcription:
, , .
and are used as
click letters.
See also
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* (Praslesham)
* ⟨
Sz⟩ (a Polish digraph)
* ⟨
Sh⟩ (an English and Albanian digraph)
*
Latin-script S-based digraphs (including the Italian ⟨sc⟩, English ⟨sh⟩, and Norwegian and Faroese ⟨sk⟩)
*
Latin-script S-based trigraphs (including German ⟨sch⟩ and Italian ⟨sci⟩)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:S, esh
Latin-script letters
Phonetic transcription symbols