thumb|Shcha, from the Alphabet Book оf the Red Army Soldier (1921). The illustration depicts (shchuk), "[[pike (fish)|pike" (acc. pl.).]]

Shcha (Щ щ; italics: Щ щ or <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">Щ&nbsp;щ</span>; italics: <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">Щ&nbsp;щ</span>), Shta, or Scha is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster and is named Shta.

While in the Russian the letter represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative , similar to the pronunciation of in "sheep", in the Ukrainian and Rusyn, represents the consonant cluster (a hard followed by , as in "borscht"). This pronunciation preserves the historical character of as a combination of sounds, consistent with its Old Church Slavonic origins, unlike the modern Russian pronunciation. The official Ukrainian transliteration system renders the letter as , reflecting this two-component structure. This is also reflected in Belarusian, where the letter was abolished in favour of the phonetic spelling to represent the similar sound cluster .

Most other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter for loanwords or foreign names; in these contexts, it is often pronounced , an approximation of the Russian pronunciation.

In English, is romanized as , , or occasionally as . English-speaking learners are often instructed to pronounce it as a cluster, although this no longer reflects the standard modern Russian phonetic realization.

History

Cyrillic Щ (Early Cyrillic form: 20px|class=skin-invert-image) is derived from the Glagolitic letter shta , which was a ligature of sha (= Cyrillic Ш, pronounced ), and tverdo (= Cyrillic Т, pronounced ). The original pronunciation, , is maintained in Bulgarian.

This letter was also used in the Komi language as , but it has fallen out of use in favour of digraph .

Form

The form of the letter shcha is considered to have originated as a ligature of the letters Ш and Т. However in later orthographies it began to be depicted as the letter Cyrillic Sha (Ш ш) with a descender. The descender (also used in Ц) has been reinterpreted as a diacritic and used in several letters for non-Slavic languages, such as Ң and Қ.

  • Ш ш : Cyrillic letter Sha
  • С́ с́ : Montenegrin Sje
  • Ŝ ŝ : Latin letter Ŝ
  • Ś ś : Latin letter Ś

Computing codes

See also

  • Mama ŠČ!
  • Transliteration table for romanization of Russian, provides versions (note circumflex vs. caron/háček in ),

References