S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound , 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 limbei române, introducing ș for and ț for .
[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 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 , 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).[Unicode code charts. Latin Extended-B: Range 0180–024F] In HTML, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.
Usage
The letter represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in "
show") in Romanian language. On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol Ş/ş (
S-cedilla) is used. Example word: Timișoara.
Character encoding
See also
