Sha, She or Shu, alternatively transliterated Ša (Ш ш; italics:
Ш ш) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ//, like the pronunciation of sh in "ship". More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is commonly transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative pronounced as //ʂ//. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet for Slavic and non-Slavic languages.In English, Sha is romanized as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
Sha has its earliest origins in Phoenician Shin and is possibly linked closely to Shin's Greek equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (The similar form of the modern Hebrew Shin (ש), which is probably where the Cyrillic letter was actually derived from, derives from the same Proto-Canaanite source). Sha already possessed its current form in Saints Cyril and Methodius's Glagolitic alphabet. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek, but as there was no Greek sign for the Sha sound (modern Greek uses simply "Σ/σ/ς" to spell the sh-sound in foreign words and names), Glagolitic Sha (Ⱎ) was adopted unchanged. There is also a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet, which is the same as the Greek alphabet but with a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" (Ϣϣ) which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance. There is also a possibility that Sha was taken from the Arabic letter ش.
Sha is used in the alphabets of all Slavic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet, and of most non-Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The position in the alphabet and the sound represented by the letter vary from language to language.
| Language | Position in alphabet | Represented sound | Romanization | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Belarusian | 27th | voiceless retroflex fricative pronounced as //ʂ// | sh | |
| Bulgarian | 25th | voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ// | sh | |
| Macedonian | 31st | voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ// | š or sh | |
| Russian | 26th | voiceless retroflex fricative pronounced as //ʂ// | sh | |
| Serbian | 30th | voiceless retroflex fricative pronounced as //ʂ// | š | |
| Ukrainian | 29th | voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ// | sh | |
| Uzbek (1940–1994) | 20th | voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ// | sh | |
| Mongolian | 28th | voiceless postalveolar affricate pronounced as //ʃ// | š | |
| Kazakh | 34th | voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative pronounced as //ɕ// | ş | |
| Kyrgyz | 29th | voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ// | ş | |
| Dungan | 32nd | voiceless retroflex fricative pronounced as //ʂ// | sh | |
| other non-Slavic languages | voiceless postalveolar fricative pronounced as //ʃ// |
The Cyrillic letter Ш is internationally used in mathematics for several concepts:
In algebraic geometry, the Tate–Shafarevich group of an Abelian variety A over a field K is denoted Ш(A/K), a notation first suggested by J. W. S. Cassels. (Previously it had been denoted TS.) Presumably the choice comes from the first letter of Шафаре́вич = Shafarevich.
In a different mathematical context, some authors allude to the shape of the letter Sha when they use the term Shah function for what is otherwise called a Dirac comb.
The shuffle product is often denoted by ш.[1]