Ș

Not to be confused withŞ (S-cedilla).

S-comma

Appearance ofcomma(upper row) andcedilla(lower row) in the Times New Roman font. Note that the cedilla is placed higher than the comma.

S-comma(majuscule:Ș,minuscule:ș) is a letter which is part of theRomanian Alpha bet,used to represent the sound/ʃ/,thevoiceless postalveolar fricative(likeshinshoe). S-comma consists of an s with adiacritical commaunderneath it, and is distinct froms-cedilla.

History

S with "half moon" beneath ( "ssubnotamus 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.

S-cedilla,T-cedillaand a cedilla illustrated with a comma inOrtografia limbei românepublished by the Romanian Academy in 1895.

The letter was proposed in theBuda Lexicon,a book published in 1825, which included two texts byPetru Maior,Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum claviandDialogu pentru inceputul linbei române,introducing ș for/ʃ/and ț for/ts/.

Unicode support

S-comma was not initially supported in earlyUnicodeversions, nor in the predecessors likeISO/IEC 8859-2andWindows-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 betweenșandşis minimal. In 1999, at the request of theRomanian Standardization Association,S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions ofMicrosoftWindows 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 likepublishing.

The letter is part of Unicode'sLatin Extended-Brange, 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).InHTML,these can be encoded byȘandș,respectively.

Use of the comma with the letterS

Șș
S-comma

• Romanian
  • TheRomanianletterȘ/ș(S with comma) represents thevoiceless postalveolar fricative/ʃ/(as in "show "). On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbolŞ/ş(S with cedilla) is used. Example word:Timișoara.

Character encoding

Character information

Preview	Ș		ș
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW		LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	536	U+0218	537	U+0219
UTF-8	200 152	C8 98	200 153	C8 99
Numeric character reference	Ș	Ș	ș	ș

See also

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