Shcha (Щ щ; italics: ''Щ щ''), Shta or Sha with descender is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

. In

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

, it represents the

voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative The voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ("c", plus the curl also found in its voiced counterp ...

, similar to the pronunciation of in ''sheep'' (but

longer "Longer" is a song written and recorded by the American singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg and released in 1979 by Full Moon Records and Epic Records. The song can be found on Fogelberg's 1979 album '' Phoenix''. It was also included on his 1982 gre ...

). In

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...

and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster . In

Bulgarian Bulgarian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria * Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group * Bulgarian language, a Slavic language * Bulgarian alphabet * A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria * Bul ...

, it represents the consonant cluster . Other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced and is often omitted when teaching those languages. In English, Shcha is romanized as or (with

háček A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark (� ...

s) or occasionally as , all reflecting the historical Russian pronunciation of the letter (as a combined ''Ш'' and ''Ч''). English-speaking learners of Russian are often instructed to pronounce it in this way although it is no longer the standard pronunciation in Russian (it still is in Ukrainian and Rusyn, as above). The letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in related words in Belarusian.

History

The Cyrillic letter Shcha was derived from the

Glagolitic The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...

letter Shta (). The name in the

Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...

was (''šta'') and is preserved in modern

; it is pronounced "штъ". This letter was also used in Komi (harder than ''ч''), which is now represented by the digraph ''тш''.

Form

The form of the letter Shcha is the letter Cyrillic Sha (Ш ш) with a descender (cf. the Cyrillic letters De (Д д), Tse (Ц ц),

Ka with descender Ka with descender (Қ қ; italics: ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in a number of non-Slavic languages spoken in the territory of the former Soviet Union, including: * the Turkic languages Kazakh, Uighur, Uzbek and several smalle ...

(Қ қ), and En with descender (Ң ң).

Related letters and other similar characters

*Ш ш : Cyrillic letter Sha *С́ с́ : Montenegrin Cyrillic letter Sje *Ŝ ŝ : Latin letter Ŝ *Ś ś : Latin letter Ś

Computing codes

References

External links