Sho (letter)
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Archaic local variants
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The letter ϸ (sometimes called sho or san) was a letter added to the Greek alphabet in order to write the Bactrian language.[1] It was similar in appearance to the Anglo-Saxon 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" ([ʃ]). Its conventional transliteration in Latin is ⟨š⟩.[2]
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.[3] This letter ϸ closely resembles, perhaps coincidentally, the letter ⟨ρ), the letter with which it seems to be graphically related.[1] Ϸ was added to Unicode in version 4.0 (2003), in an uppercase and lowercase character designed for modern typography.
Other representations of [ʃ] in the Greek alphabet
The modern Cypriot Greek dialect also has a [ʃ] sound, but it is represented with the combining caron ⟨ˇ⟩, by the authors of the "Syntychies" lexicographic database at the University of Cyprus, [4] e.g. μάσ̌σ̌αλλα [ˈmaʃːalːa] "mashallah". When diacritics are not used, an epenthetic ⟨ι⟩—often accompanied by the systematic substitution of the preceding consonant letter—may be used to the same effect, e.g. Standard Modern Greek χέρι [ˈçeɾi] → Cypriot Greek σιέρι [ˈʃeɾi].
The Tsakonian language, considered a Hellenic language or a very divergent dialect of Greek, has a [ʃ] sound. It is spelled ⟨σχ⟩ or, in Thanasis Costakis' orthography, ⟨σ̌⟩.
Appearance | Code points | Name |
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Ϸ | U+03F7 | GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SHO |
ϸ | U+03F8 | GREEK SMALL LETTER SHO |
References
- ^ a b c Everson, M. and Sims-Williams, N. (2002) “Proposal to add two Greek letters for Bactrian to the UCS”,ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2411.
- ^ Skjærvø, P. O. (2009). "Bactrian". In Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. Oxford: Elsevier. p. 115. ISBN 9780080877754.
- ^ Tarn, William Woodthorpe (1961). The Greeks in Bactria and India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 508. ISBN 9781108009416.
- ^ Themistocleous et al. 2012, pp. 263–264.
- Themistocleous, Charalambos; Katsoyannou, Marianna; Armosti, Spyros; Christodoulou, Kyriaci (7–11 August 2012). Cypriot Greek Lexicography: A Reverse Dictionary of Cypriot Greek (PDF). 15th European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) Conference. Oslo, Norway. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 August 2016. Retrieved 12 February 2013.
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