Sha (Cyrillic)


Sha, alternatively transliterated Ša is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, like the pronunciation of sh in "shoe". More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is often falsely transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative, but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative. 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, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

History

Sha has its earliest origins in Phoenician Shin and is possibly linked closely to Shin's Greek equivalent: Sigma.. 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, Glagolitic Sha was adopted unchanged. There is also a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet, which is the same as the Greek alphabet but with a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha in appearance.

Usage

Sha is used in the alphabets of all Slavic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet, and of most non-Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The position in the alphabet and the sound represented by the letter vary from language to language.
LanguagePosition in
alphabet		Represented soundRomanization
Belarusian27thvoiceless retroflex fricative š
Bulgarian25thvoiceless postalveolar fricative sh
Macedonian31stvoiceless postalveolar fricative š or sh
Russian26thvoiceless retroflex fricative sh
Serbian30thvoiceless retroflex fricative š
Ukrainian29thvoiceless postalveolar fricative sh
Uzbek 26thvoiceless postalveolar fricative sh
Mongolian28thvoiceless postalveolar affricate š
Kazakh34thvoiceless alveolo-palatal fricative ş
Kyrgyz29thvoiceless postalveolar fricative ş
Dungan31stvoiceless retroflex fricative sh
other non-Slavic languagesvoiceless postalveolar fricative

Use in mathematics

The Cyrillic letter Ш is internationally used in mathematics for several concepts:
In algebraic geometry, the Tate–Shafarevich group of an Abelian variety A over a field K is denoted Ш, a notation first suggested by J. W. S. Cassels. Presumably the choice comes from the first letter of Шафаре́вич = Shafarevich.
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.

Related letters