Esh (letter)

This article is about the letter ʃ ("esh"). For the IPA symbol, see voiceless postalveolar fricative. For the letter esh 𐑇 in the Deseret alphabet, see Deseret alphabet.

Not to be confused with ezh, the letter's voiced counterpart; the letter ſ (the "long s"); the integral symbol (∫); or the Greek letter sigma (Σ).

Esh
Ʃ ʃ
(See below)
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic and logographic
Language of origin	Latin language, Serer language
Sound values	[ ʃ ], [ ʄ ] /ˈɛʃ/
In  Unicode	U+01A9, U+0283
History
Development	Σ σ ς ς 𐌔 S s S ſ Ʃ ʃ
Time period	1847 to present
Descendants	None
Sisters	Š ſ Ꚃ Ѕ С Ш Щ Ҫ Ԍ ש ش ܫ س ࠔ 𐎘 𐡔 ሠ Ս ս श स શ સ Disputed: ㅅ ㅆ
Variations	(See below)
Other
Associated graphs	s(x), sh, š
Writing direction	Left-to-Right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Esh (majuscule: Ʃ, minuscule: ʃ) is a character used in phonology to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English ⟨sh⟩, as in "ship").

In Unicode, these letters are encoded as U+01A9ƩLATIN CAPITAL LETTER ESH and U+0283ʃLATIN SMALL LETTER ESH

Form, usage, and history

Its lowercase form ⟨ʃ⟩ is similar to an integral sign ⟨∫⟩ or a long s ⟨ſ⟩ with an extra leftward hook at the bottom. In 1928, the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter sigma for the uppercase form ⟨Ʃ⟩. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman 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 [ ʄ ] consonant.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses U+0283ʃLATIN SMALL LETTER ESH to represent a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant. Related obsolete IPA characters include U+01AAƪLATIN LETTER REVERSED ESH LOOP, U+0285ʅLATIN SMALL LETTER SQUAT REVERSED ESH, and U+0286ʆLATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH CURL.

U+AB4DꭍLATIN SMALL LETTER BASELINE ESH is used in the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system. ^[1]

Variations of esh are used for other phonetic transcription: ^[2] ⟨ ᶋ ⟩, ⟨ ᶘ ⟩, ⟨ ^ʃ ⟩.

U+1DF0B𝼋LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH DOUBLE BAR and U+1DF0C𝼌LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH DOUBLE BAR AND CURL are used as click letters. ^{[3] [4]}

See also

• Language portal

• U+222B∫ INTEGRAL
• U+017Fſ LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S
• U+03A3Σ GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA
• U+03C3σ GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA
• U+0428Ш CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHA

• U+0160Š LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON
• U+015EŞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CEDILLA
• U+0D3Dഽ MALAYALAM SIGN AVAGRAHA (Praslesham)
• ⟨Sz⟩ (a Polish digraph)
• ⟨Sh⟩ (an English and Albanian digraph)
• Latin-script S-based digraphs (including the Italian ⟨sc⟩, English ⟨sh⟩, and Norwegian and Faroese ⟨sk⟩)
• Latin-script S-based trigraphs (including German ⟨sch⟩ and Italian ⟨sci⟩)

References

1. Everson, Michael; Dicklberger, Alois; Pentzlin, Karl; Wandl-Vogt, Eveline (2011-06-02). "L2/11-202: Revised proposal to encode "Teuthonista" phonetic characters in the UCS" (PDF).
2. Constable, Peter (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF).
3. Miller, Kirk; Sands, Bonny (2020-07-10). "L2/20-115R: Unicode request for additional phonetic click letters" (PDF).
4. Anderson, Deborah (2020-12-07). "L2/21-021: Reference doc numbers for L2/20-266R "Consolidated code chart of proposed phonetic characters" and IPA etc. code point and name changes" (PDF).