thumb|S-comma|class=skin-invert-image

thumb|180px|Appearance of [[Comma#Diacritical usage|comma (upper row) and cedilla (lower row) in the Times New Roman font. Note that the cedilla is placed higher than the comma.|class=skin-invert-image]]

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 , 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 .

thumb|none|400px|S with "half moon" beneath ("s subnotamus signo mediae lunulae") proposed as a letter in the Buda Lexicon. Note that the form is reversed from the modern version, resembling a small C.|class=skin-invert-image

thumb|none|400px|[[Ş|S-cedilla, T-cedilla and a cedilla illustrated with a comma in Ortografia limbei române published by the Romanian Academy in 1895.|class=skin-invert-image]]

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). In HTML, these can be encoded by <code>&amp;#x218;</code> and <code>&amp;#x219;</code>, respectively.

Usage

The letter represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in "<u>sh</u>ow") in Romanian language. On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol Ş/ş (S with cedilla) is used. Example word: .

Character encoding

See also

  • Ş (S-cedilla)
  • Š
  • Ț (T-comma)
  • D̦ (D-comma)

References