Esh

Esh (majuscule: Ʃ, minuscule: ʃ; Unicode U+01A9, U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin alphabet, introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English sh), and is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet as well as in the alphabets of some African languages.

Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to an italic long s ſ or an integral sign ∫; its uppercase form Ʃ is based on the Greek letter sigma.

Other languages

The consonant ʃ is spelt like this:

• ش in Arabic
• շ in Armenian
• ss in Auvergnat
• x in Catalan, Galician, Leonese, Maltese and Capeverdean
• ш in Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian, Russian, Bulgarian, and Belarusian.
• ϣ in Coptic
• š in Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene
• श in the Devanāgarī script
• sj in Danish, Dutch and Norwegian
• sh in English, Albanian
• ŝ in Esperanto
• ch in French
• შ in Georgian
• sch in German, and the s in front of t or p.
• שׁ in Hebrew
• s in Hungarian
• s in Irish Gaeilge and Scottish Gàidhlig when followed by e or i; also when preceded by i
• sc in Old English, and in Italian when followed by e or i
• sz in Polish
• rz in Polish when following ch, p, t, e.g. Przemyśl
• x or ch in Portuguese
• ș in Romanian
• x in Mexican Spanish (certain words only, e.g. Mexica, xoloitzcuintle)
• ll in some forms of Rioplatense Spanish (especially in Buenos Aires, Argentina.)
• rs in those Swedish dialects that have it - the letters may also be pronounced as French r + s (Scania) or as Italian r + s (Finland).
• ş in Turkish and some modern Ladino
• שֿ in Yiddish and traditional Ladino

See also

• Long s (the ſ character)

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