Sh (digraph)

European languages

Albanian

In Albanian, sh represents . It is considered a distinct letter, named shë, and placed between S and T in the Albanian alphabet.

Breton

In Breton, sh represents . It is not considered a distinct letter and it is a variety of zh (e. g. koshoc'h ("older"). It is not considered as a digraph in compound words, such as kroashent ("roundabout": kroaz ("cross") + hent ("way", "ford").

English

In English, usually represents . The main exception is in compound words, where the and are not a digraph, but pronounced separately, e.g. hogshead is hogs-head , not *hog-shead . Sh is not considered a distinct letter for collation purposes.

American Literary braille includes a single-cell contraction for the digraph with the dot pattern (1 4 6). In isolation it stands for the word "shall".

In Old English orthography, the sound was written . In Middle English it came to be written or ; the latter spelling has been adopted as the usual one in Modern English.

Irish

In Irish, represents and marks the lenition of ; for example mo shaol "my life" (cf. saol "life").

Ladino

In Judaeo-Spanish, sh represents and occurs in both native words (lad, ‘under’) and foreign ones (shalom, ‘hello’). In the Hebrew script it is written ש.

Occitan

In Occitan, sh represents . It mostly occurs in the Gascon dialect of Occitan and corresponds with s or ss in other Occitan dialects: peish = peis "fish", naishença = naissença "birth", sheis = sièis "six". An i before sh is silent: peish, naishença are pronounced . Some words have sh in all Occitan dialects: they are Gascon words adopted in all the Occitan language (Aush "Auch", Arcaishon "Arcachon") or foreign borrowings (shampó "shampoo").

For s·h, see Interpunct#Occitan.

Spanish

In Spanish, sh represents almost only in foreign origin words, as flash, show, shuara or geisha. Royal Spanish Academy recommends adapting in both spelling and pronunciation with s, adapting to common pronunciation in peninsular dialect. Nevertheless, in American dialects it is frequently pronounced [t͡ʃ].

Other languages

Somali

Sh represents the sound in the Somali Latin Alphabet. It is considered a separate letter, and is the 9th letter of the alphabet.

Uyghur

Sh represents the sound in the Uyghur Latin script. It is considered a separate letter, and is the 14th letter of the alphabet.

Uzbek

In Uzbek, the letter sh represents . It is the 27th letter of the Uzbek alphabet.

Finnish and Estonian

In Finnish and Estonian, sh is used in place of š to represent [ʃ] when the accented character is unavailable.

Romanization

In various romanizations of Standard Chinese, including pinyin and Wade-Giles, sh represents the voiceless retroflex fricative .

In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, sh represents . Other romanizations write as s before i and sy before other vowels.

International auxiliary languages

Ido

In Ido, sh represents .

References

References

1. Royal Spanish Academy. '''''Ortografía de la lengua española''''' (2010). (in spanish), pp. 127-128
2. David D., Laitin. (1977-01-01). "Politics, language, and thought: the Somali experience". University of Chicago Press.