S-comma

Not to be confused with Ş (S-cedilla).

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.

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).

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/.

Unicode support

S-comma was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-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 between ș and ş is minimal. In 1999, at the request of the Romanian Standardization Association, S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Microsoft Windows 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 like publishing.

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). 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(  ̏ ) circumflex( ˆ ) caron, háček( ˇ ) breve( ˘ ) inverted breve(   ̑  ) cedilla( ¸ ) diaeresis, umlaut( ¨ ) dot( · ) palatal hook(   ̡ ) retroflex hook(   ̢ ) hook above, dấu hỏi(  ̉ ) horn(  ̛ ) iota subscript(  ͅ ) macron( ˉ ) ogonek, nosinė( ˛ ) perispomene(  ͂ ) overring( ˚ ) underring( ˳ ) rough breathing( ῾ ) smooth breathing( ᾿ ) Marks sometimes used as diacritics apostrophe( ’ ) bar( ◌̸ ) colon( : ) comma( , ) period( . ) hyphen( ˗ ) prime( ′ ) tilde( ~ ) Diacritical marks in other scripts Arabic diacritics Early Cyrillic diacritics kamora(  ҄ ) pokrytie(  ҇ ) titlo(  ҃ ) Gurmukhī diacritics Hebrew diacritics Indic diacritics anusvara( ं ং ം ) chandrabindu( ँ ఁ ) nukta( ़ ) virama( ् ് ్ ් ್ ) visarga( ः ঃ ) 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.