S-comma

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe).

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

History

S "half moon" proposed as a letter in the Buda Lexicon.

S cedilla, T cedilla and a cedilla illustrated with a comma in Ortografia limbei române published by the Romanian Academy in 1895.

The letter was proposed in the Buda Lexicon, a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi and Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române, introducing ș for /ʃ/ and ț for /ts/.[1]

Unicode support

This letter however was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250. Instead, Ş (S-cedilla) was used for digital texts written in Romanian, a convention that still exists today. In some contexts, like with low-resolution screens and printouts, the visual distinction between ș and ş is minimal.

S-comma was later introduced in Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian national standardization body. Computers with Microsoft operating systems older than Windows XP do not have compatible fonts. Encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Windows XP, but the European Union Expansion Font Update from Microsoft provides the feature. Although accessibility issues are a concern only on legacy systems, because of inertia and/or ignorance some newly-produced Romanian texts still use Ş (S-cedilla, available from Unicode version 1.1.0, June 1993.

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).[2] In HTML, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

Use of the comma with the letter S

Șș
S-comma
Diacritics in Latin & Greek accent acute´ double acute˝ grave` double grave ̏ circumflexˆ caron, háčekˇ breve˘ inverted breve  ̑   cedilla¸ diaeresis, umlaut¨ dot· palatal hook  ̡ retroflex hook  ̢ hook above, dấu hỏi ̉ horn ̛ iota subscript ͅ  macronˉ ogonek, nosinė˛ perispomene ͂  overring˚ underring˳ rough breathing῾ smooth breathing᾿ Marks sometimes used as diacritics apostrophe’ bar◌̸ colon: comma, full stop/period. hyphen˗ prime′ tilde~ Diacritical marks in other scripts Arabic diacritics Early Cyrillic diacritics kamora ҄ pokrytie ҇ titlo ҃ Gurmukhī diacritics Hebrew diacritics Indic diacritics anusvaraं ং ം chandrabinduँ ఁ nukta़ virama् ് ్ ් ್ visargaः ঃ IPA diacritics Japanese diacritics dakuten ﾞ handakuten ﾟ Khmer diacritics Syriac diacritics Thai diacritics Related Dotted circle◌ Punctuation marks Logic symbols

• Romanian
  • The Romanian letter Ș/ș (S with comma) represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in "show"). On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol Ş/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	decimal	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)
• D-comma

References

1. Marinella Lörinczi Angioni, "Coscienza nazionale romanza e ortografia: il romeno tra alfabeto cirillico e alfabeto latino ", La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 5, La scrittura: funzioni e ideologie. (Apr., 1982), pp. 75–85.
2. Unicode code charts. Latin Extended-B: Range 0180–024F