Shcha


Shcha, Shta, or Scha is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative, similar to the pronunciation of sh in 'sheep'. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster, like the pronunciation of “scht” in Borscht. In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster. Most other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced, an approximation of the Russian pronunciation of the letter, and is often omitted when teaching those languages.
In English, Russian Shcha is romanized as,, or occasionally as, all reflecting the historical Russian pronunciation of the letter. English-speaking learners of Russian are often instructed to pronounce it in this way although it is no longer the standard pronunciation in Russian. The letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in related words in Belarusian.

History

Cyrillic Щ is derived from the Glagolitic letter shta, which was a ligature of sha , and tverdo . The original pronunciation,, is maintained in Bulgarian.
This letter was also used in the Komi language as, but it has fallen out of use in favour of digraph.

Form

The form of the letter shcha is considered to have originated as a ligature of the letters Ш and Т. However in later orthographies it began to be depicted as the letter Cyrillic Sha with a descender. The descender has been reinterpreted as a diacritic and used in several letters for non-Slavic languages, such as Ң and Қ.

Related letters and other similar characters