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 BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...

in order to write the

Bactrian language Bactrian (, , meaning "Iranian") was an Eastern Iranian language formerly spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria (present-day Afghanistan) and used as the official language of the Kushan and the Hephthalite empires. Name It was long tho ...

.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 The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...

and Icelandic letter thorn (þ), which has typically been used to represent it in modern print, although they are historically 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 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 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 ...

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 a voiceless postalveolar fricative, 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 , ), 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 language sometimes referred to ...

→ Cypriot Greek . The

Tsakonian language Tsakonian or Tsaconian (also Tzakonian or Tsakonic, and Tsakonian: , ) is a highly divergent modern variety of Greek, spoken in the Tsakonian region of the Peloponnese, Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in So ...

, considered a Hellenic language or a very divergent dialect of Greek, has a voiceless postalveolar fricative. It is spelled or, in Thanasis Costakis' orthography, .

References

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