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 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 system ...

: 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 The integral symbol (''see below'') is used to denote integrals and antiderivatives in mathematics, especially in calculus. History The notation was introduced by the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1675 in his private w ...

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 The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) is a set of letters designed as the basis for Latin alphabets for the languages of Africa. It was initially developed in 1928 by the International Institute of African Lan ...

borrowed the

Greek Greek may refer to: 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 of all kno ...

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 Sir Isaac Pitman (4 January 1813 – 22 January 1897) was an English publisher and teacher of the :English language who developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known now as Pitman shorthand. He first proposed this in ''Stenogr ...

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 letter A Nama man giving a literacy lesson in Khoekhoegowab that includes click letters Various letters have been used to write the click consonants of southern Africa. The precursors of the current IPA letters, ⟨ǀ⟩ ⟨ǁ⟩ ⟨ǃ⟩ ⟨ǂ⟩, w ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:S, esh Latin-script letters Phonetic transcription symbols

Form, usage, and history

See also

References