The Western Greek alphabet used in Cumae was adopted by the Etruscans and Latins in the 7th century BC, and over the following centuries, it developed into a range of Old Italic alphabets, including the Etruscan alphabet and the early Latin alphabet. In Etruscan, the value /s/ of Greek sigma (��) was maintained, while san (��) represented a separate phoneme, most likely /ʃ/ “sh” (transliterated as ś). The early Latin alphabet adopted sigma, but not san, as Old Latin did not have a /ʃ/ “sh” phoneme.
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
It also commonly represents a voiced alveolar sibilant /z/, as in ‘rose’ and ‘bands’. Due to yod-coalescence, it may also represent a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative /ʃ/, as in ‘sugar’, or a voiced palato-alveolar fricative /ʒ/, as in ‘measure’. It corresponds to the Semitic sin “tooth.” The Greek treatment of the sibilants that occur in the Semitic alphabet is somewhat complicated. The Semitic samech appears in Greek as Ξ (xi) with the value in early times of /ss/, later and more generally of /x/ or /ks/.
Other representations
The name samech, however, which through its Aramaic form became in Greek Σ (sigma), was applied to the letter that corresponded to Semitic sin and stood for /s/. Semitic ssade appears in the early alphabets of Thera and Corinth in a form that represents /s/. These alphabets have no sigma, while those that have sigma do not have the Semitic ssade. Certain variants of Belarusian Latin[10] and Bulgarian Latin also use the letter. The grapheme Š, š (S with caron) is used in various contexts representing the sh sound like in the word show, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ or similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/.
Word History and Origins
This has become voiced in English when intervocalic (e.g., in houses and nose). In most other positions, it remains unvoiced (e.g., in sing, save, speak, and aspect). When doubled, the letter represents the unvoiced sound in all positions (e.g., in grasses, miss, and assess). In vision and other words ending in -sion, the s, provided it is not doubled, has the voiced sound /zh/, and it has a similar sound in such words as pleasure and leisure.
- In most other positions, it remains unvoiced (e.g., in sing, save, speak, and aspect).
- Semitic ssade appears in the early alphabets of Thera and Corinth in a form that represents /s/.
- There was a Greek minuscule form c of the 9th century ce, and this may be the source both of the Cyrillic c and of the lunate sigma used in some fonts of modern Greek type.
- In other Italic alphabets (Venetic, Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes.
- The letter is also used in Lakota,[13] Cheyenne, Myaamia[14] and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree),[15] Classical Malay (until end of 19th century) and some African languages such as Northern Sotho and Songhay.
In some words of French origin, ⟨s⟩ is silent, as in ‘isle’ or ‘debris’. The ⟨sh⟩ digraph for English /ʃ/ arose in Middle English (alongside ⟨sch⟩), replacing the Old English ⟨sc⟩ digraph. Similarly, Old High German ⟨sc⟩ was replaced by ⟨sch⟩ in Early Modern High German orthography.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with ʃ or ʂ, but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. It represents the same sound as the Turkic letter Ş and the Romanian letter Ș (S-comma), the Hebrew and Yiddish letter ש, the Ge’ez (Ethiopic) letter ሠ, the Arabic letter ش, and the Armenian letter Շ(շ). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨s⟩ represents the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/. The shape of Latin S arises from Greek Σ by dropping one out of the four strokes of that letter. The (angular) S-shape composed of three strokes existed as a variant of the four-stroke letter Σ already in the epigraphy of Western Greek alphabets, and the three and four strokes variants existed alongside one another in the classical Etruscan alphabet. In other Italic alphabets (Venetic, Lepontic), the letter could be represented as a zig-zagging line of any number between three and six strokes.
A rounded form appeared in the Chalcidian alphabet, and from this it was taken into Latin. Etruscan had no rounded form, but it appears in Umbrian and Faliscan. In England in the 17th century a looped form was introduced, and this is occasionally still seen in handwriting when followed by another s. There was a Greek minuscule form c of the 9th century ce, and this may be the source both of the Cyrillic c and of the lunate sigma used in some fonts of modern Greek type.
In Portuguese, it may represent the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative /ʃ/ in most dialects when syllable-final, and [ʒ] in European Portuguese Islão (Islam) or, in many sociolects of Brazilian Portuguese, esdrúxulo (proparoxytone). In addition, the grapheme transliterates cuneiform orthography of Sumerian and Akkadian /ʃ/ or /t͡ʃ/, and (based on Akkadian orthography) the Hittite /s/ phoneme, as well as the /ʃ/ phoneme of Semitic languages, transliterating shin (Phoenician and its descendants), the direct predecessor of Cyrillic ш. The letter is also used in Lakota,[13] Cheyenne, Myaamia[14] and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree),[15] Classical Malay (until end of 19th century) and some African languages such as Northern Sotho and Songhay. In several Western Romance languages, like Spanish and French, the final ⟨s⟩ is the usual mark of plural nouns. In most Western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century.
In Spain, the change was mainly accomplished between 1760 and 1766. Printers in the United States stopped using the long s between 1795 and 1810. In English orthography, the London printer John Bell (1745–1831) pioneered the change.
The Italic letter was also adopted into Elder Futhark, as Sowilō (ᛊ), and appears with four to eight strokes in the earliest runic inscriptions, but is occasionally reduced to three strokes (ᛋ) from the later 5th century, and appears regularly with three strokes in Younger Futhark. The minuscule form ſ, called the long s, developed in the early medieval period, within the Visigothic and Carolingian hands, with predecessors in the half-uncial and cursive scripts of Late Antiquity. It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule “round” or “short” s, which were at the time only used at the end of words.
Outside Europe, Syriac Latin[12] adopted the letter but it, alongside other letters with diacritics, is rarely used. The alphabet is not used natively to write the language for which the Syriac alphabet is used instead. For use in computer systems, Š and š are at Unicode codepoints U+0160 and U+0161 (Alt 0138 and Alt 0154 for input), respectively. In HTML code, the entities Š and š can also be used to represent the characters. For example, “my son’s toys” will be “the toys that belong to my son”.
His edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, was advertised with the claim that he “ventured to depart from the common mode by rejecting the long ‘ſ’ in favor of the round one, as being less liable to error…..”[5] The Times of London made the switch from the long to the short s with its issue of 10 September 1803. Encyclopædia Britannica’s 5th edition, completed in 1817, was the last edition to use the long s. The symbol is also used as the romanization of Cyrillic ш in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration and deployed in the Latinic writing systems of Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bashkir. It is also used in some systems of transliterating Georgian to represent ⟨შ⟩ (/ʃ/). Hungarian uses the basic Latin letter s and uses the digraph sz as equivalent to most other languages that use s.