Ș

Șș
Șș
S-comma

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe). S-comma consists of an s with a diacritical comma underneath it, and is distinct from s-cedilla.

History

The letter was proposed in the Buda Lexicon, a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi and Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române, introducing ș for /ʃ/ and ț for /ts/.^[1]

Unicode support

S-comma was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250. Instead, Ş (S-cedilla), a character available since Unicode 1.1.0 (1993), was used for digital texts written in Romanian. In some contexts, like with low-resolution screens and printouts, the visual distinction between ș and ş is minimal. In 1999, at the request of the Romanian Standardization Association [ro]^{[citation needed]}, S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Microsoft Windows XP, but a later European Union Expansion Font Update provided the feature. While digital accessibility to S-comma has since improved, both characters continue to be used interchangeably in various contexts like publishing.

The letter is part of Unicode's Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", titled as "Latin capital letter S with comma below" (U+0218) and "Latin small letter s with comma below" (U+0219).^[2] In HTML, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

Use of the comma with the letter S

Romanian
- The Romanian letter Ș/ș (S with comma) represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in "show"). On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol Ş/ş (S with cedilla) is used. Example word: Timișoara.

Character encoding

Character information
Preview	Ș		ș
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW		LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	536	U+0218	537	U+0219
UTF-8	200 152	C8 98	200 153	C8 99
Numeric character reference	Ș	Ș	ș	ș

References

^ Marinella Lörinczi Angioni, "Coscienza nazionale romanza e ortografia: il romeno tra alfabeto cirillico e alfabeto latino ", La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 5, La scrittura: funzioni e ideologie. (Apr., 1982), pp. 75–85.
^ Unicode code charts. Latin Extended-B: Range 0180–024F