Sha
Encyclopedia
For other uses, see Sha (disambiguation)
.
Sha (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative
/ʃ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in "sheep", or the somewhat similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, for Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
In English, Sha is romanized
as ⟨sh⟩ or as ⟨š⟩, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
Shin
and is linked closely to Shin's Greek
equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (Note the similar form of the modern Hebrew
Shin (ש), which is probably the origin of this letter, deriving from the same Proto-Canaanite source). Sha already possessed its current form in Saints Cyril
and Methodius's Glagolitic alphabet
. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek, but as there was no Greek sign for the Sha sound (modern Greek uses simply "Σ/σ/ς" to spell the sh-sound in foreign words and names), Glagolitic Sha was adopted unchanged. There is a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet
, which was the same as the Greek alphabet but had a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance.
In algebraic geometry
, the Tate-Shafarevich group of an Abelian variety
A over a field
K is denoted Ш(A/K), a notation first suggested by J. W. S. Cassels
. (Previously it had been unimaginatively denoted TS.)
In a different mathematical context, some authors allude to the shape of the letter Sha when they use the term Shah function for what is otherwise called a Dirac comb
.
The shuffle product is often denoted by ш.
Sha (disambiguation)
Sha is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.Sha or SHA may also refer to:* SH. a., a type of company* Sha , the totemic animal of the Egyptian god Set* Sha , a French comic by Pat Mills...
.
Sha (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative
Voiceless postalveolar fricative
The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or voiceless domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages, including English...
/ʃ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in "sheep", or the somewhat similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, for Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
In English, Sha is romanized
Romanization of Russian
Romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet...
as ⟨sh⟩ or as ⟨š⟩, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
History
Sha has its earliest origins in PhoenicianPhoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
Shin
Shin (letter)
Shin literally means "Sharp" ; It is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic/Hebrew , and Arabic ....
and is linked closely to Shin's Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (Note the similar form of the modern Hebrew
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
Shin (ש), which is probably the origin of this letter, deriving from the same Proto-Canaanite source). Sha already possessed its current form in Saints Cyril
Saints Cyril and Methodius
Saints Cyril and Methodius were two Byzantine Greek brothers born in Thessaloniki in the 9th century. They became missionaries of Christianity among the Slavic peoples of Bulgaria, Great Moravia and Pannonia. Through their work they influenced the cultural development of all Slavs, for which they...
and Methodius's Glagolitic alphabet
Glagolitic alphabet
The Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance" . The verb glagoliti means "to speak"...
. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek, but as there was no Greek sign for the Sha sound (modern Greek uses simply "Σ/σ/ς" to spell the sh-sound in foreign words and names), Glagolitic Sha was adopted unchanged. There is a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet
Coptic alphabet
The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
, which was the same as the Greek alphabet but had a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance.
Use in mathematics
Ш has the distinction of being the only distinctly Cyrillic letter internationally used in mathematics:In algebraic geometry
Algebraic geometry
Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics which combines techniques of abstract algebra, especially commutative algebra, with the language and the problems of geometry. It occupies a central place in modern mathematics and has multiple conceptual connections with such diverse fields as complex...
, the Tate-Shafarevich group of an Abelian variety
Abelian variety
In mathematics, particularly in algebraic geometry, complex analysis and number theory, an abelian variety is a projective algebraic variety that is also an algebraic group, i.e., has a group law that can be defined by regular functions...
A over a field
Field (mathematics)
In abstract algebra, a field is a commutative ring whose nonzero elements form a group under multiplication. As such it is an algebraic structure with notions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, satisfying certain axioms...
K is denoted Ш(A/K), a notation first suggested by J. W. S. Cassels
J. W. S. Cassels
John William Scott Cassels , FRS is a leading English mathematician.-Biography:Educated at Neville's Cross Council School in Durham and George Heriot's School in Edinburgh, Cassels graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an MA in 1943.His academic career was interrupted in World War II...
. (Previously it had been unimaginatively denoted TS.)
In a different mathematical context, some authors allude to the shape of the letter Sha when they use the term Shah function for what is otherwise called a Dirac comb
Dirac comb
In mathematics, a Dirac comb is a periodic Schwartz distribution constructed from Dirac delta functions...
.
The shuffle product is often denoted by ш.
Related letters and other similar characters
- ש : Hebrew letter Shin/Sin
- Ɯ ɯ : Latin letter inverted M : Latin letter Esh
- Š š : Latin letter S with caronŠThe grapheme Š, š is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with , but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.For use in computer...
- Щ щ : Cyrillic letter Shcha
Computing codes
| character | Ш | ш | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHA | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHA | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1064 | 0428 | 1096 | 0448 |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
208 168 | D0 A8 | 209 136 | D1 88 |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Ш | Ш | ш | ш |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
251 | FB | 219 | DB |
| Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:... |
246 | F6 | 245 | F5 |
| Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87... |
152 | 98 | 232 | E8 |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
216 | D8 | 248 | F8 |
| ISO-8859-5 | 200 | C8 | 232 | E8 |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 152 | 98 | 248 | F8 |