The letter (sometimes called sho or san) was a letter added to the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

in order to write the

Bactrian language Bactrian (, , ) is an extinct Eastern Iranian language formerly spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria (in present-day Afghanistan) and used as the official language of the Kushan, and the Hephthalite empires. Name It was long thought t ...

.Everson, M. and Sims-Williams, N. (2002) �
Proposal to add two Greek letters for Bactrian to the UCS
��，ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2411. It was similar in appearance to the

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...

and Icelandic letter thorn (þ), which has typically been used to represent it in modern print, although both are historically quite unrelated. It probably represented a sound similar to English "sh" (). Its conventional transliteration in Latin is . KanishkaCoin3

Its original name and position in the Bactrian alphabet, if it had any, are unknown. Some authors have called it "san", on the basis of the hypothesis that it was a survival or reintroduction of the archaic Greek letter San. This letter closely resembles, perhaps coincidentally, the letter of the Greek-based

Carian alphabet The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. They consisted of some 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile ...

which may have also stood for . The name "sho" was coined for the letter for purposes of modern computer encoding in 2002, on the basis of analogy with "rho" (), the letter with which it seems to be graphically related. Ϸ was added to

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 ...

in version 4.0 (2003), in an uppercase and lowercase character designed for modern typography.

Other representations of in the Greek alphabet

The modern Cypriot Greek dialect also has an sound, but it is represented with the combining caron , by the authors of th
"Syntychies" lexicographic database
at the

University of Cyprus The University of Cyprus (Greek: Πανεπιστήμιο Κύπρου) is a public research university established in Cyprus in 1989. It admitted its first students in 1992 and has approximately 7000 students. History The University of Cyprus wa ...

, e.g. "

mashallah ''Mashallah'' ( ar, مَا شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ, '), also written Masha'Allah, Maşallah (Turkey and Azerbaijan), Masya Allah (Malaysia and Indonesia), Maschallah (Germany), and Mašallah ( Bosnia), is an Arabic phrase that is used to expre ...

". When diacritics are not used, an epenthetic —often accompanied by the systematic substitution of the preceding consonant letter—may be used to the same effect, e.g. Standard

Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...

→ Cypriot Greek . The

Tsakonian language Tsakonian or Tsaconian (also Tzakonian or Tsakonic, Greek and Tsakonian: , ) is a highly divergent modern variety of Greek, spoken in the Tsakonian region of the Peloponnese, Greece. Tsakonian derives from Doric Greek, being its only extant va ...

, considered a Hellenic language or a very divergent dialect of Greek, has a sound. It is spelled or, in

Thanasis Costakis Thanasis Costakis ( el, Θανάσης Κωστάκης, 1907–2009) was a Greek linguist and lexicographer best known for his work on the now-moribund Tsakonian language spoken in the eastern Peloponnese. Costakis was born in Pera Melana in ...

' orthography, .

References

* Greek letters Bactrian language 1st-century introductions 9th-century endings {{writingsystem-stub