S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the

Romanian alphabet The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used b ...

, used to represent the sound , the

voiceless postalveolar fricative A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voiceless ...

(like ''sh'' in ''shoe'').

History

S signo mediae lunulae in Lexicon de Buda

The letter was proposed in the ''Buda Lexicon'', a book published in 1825, which included two texts by

Petru Maior Petru Maior (; 1761 in Marosvásárhely ''(now Târgu Mureș, Romania)'' – 14 February 1821 in Budapest) was a Romanian writer who is considered one of the most influential personalities of the Age of Enlightenment in Transylvania (the ''Tran ...

, ''Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi'' and ''Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române'', introducing ș for and ț for .

Unicode support

S-comma was not initially supported in early

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

versions, nor in the predecessors like

ISO/IEC 8859-2 ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. I ...

and

Windows-1250 Windows-1250 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to represent texts in Central European and Eastern European languages that use Latin script, such as Czech (which is its main user with half its use, though Czech has 96.6% use of UTF-8, and ...

. Instead, Ş ( S-

cedilla A cedilla ( ; from Spanish) or cedille (from French , ) is a hook or tail ( ¸ ) added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese (called cedilha) it is used only under the ' ...

), 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 , S-comma was introduced in Unicode 3.0. Nevertheless, encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

, 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 Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

. The letter is part of Unicode's

Latin Extended-B Latin Extended-B is the fourth block (0180-024F) of the Unicode Standard. It has been included since version 1.0, where it was only allocated to the code points 0180-01FF and contained 113 characters. During unification with ISO 10646 for version ...

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).Unicode code charts
Latin Extended-B: Range 0180–024F
/ref> In

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

Use of the comma with the letter ''S''

Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania **Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditional ...

**The

letter (S with comma) represents the

(as in "show"). On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol ( S with cedilla) is used. Example word: .

Character encoding

References

{{Latin script, S, comma

S-comma S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound , the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like ''sh'' in ''shoe''). History The letter was proposed in the ''Buda Lexicon'' ...

History

Unicode support

Use of the comma with the letter ''S''

Character encoding

See also

References