Sh (digraph)

Sh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of S and H.

European languages

Albanian

In Albanian, sh represents [ʃ]. It is considered a distinct letter, named shë, and placed between S and T in the albanian alphabet.

Breton

In Breton, sh represents [s]. It is not considered a distinct letter and it is a variety of zh (e. g. koshoc'h ("older"). It is not considered as a diphtong in compound words, such as kroashent ("roundabout": kroaz ("cross") + hent ("way", "ford").

English

In English, ⟨sh⟩ usually represents /ʃ/. The exception is in compound words, where the ⟨s⟩ and ⟨h⟩ are not a digraph, but pronounced separately, e.g. hogshead is hogs-head /ˈhɒɡz.hɛd/, not *hog-shead /ˈhɒɡ.ʃɛd/. Sh is not considered a distinct letter for collation purposes.

American Literary braille includes a single-cell contraction for the digraph with the dot pattern (1 4 6). In isolation it stands for the word "shall".

In Old English orthography, the sound /ʃ/ was written ⟨sc⟩. In Middle English it came to be written ⟨sch⟩ or ⟨sh⟩; the latter spelling has been adopted as the usual one in Modern English.

Irish

In Irish sh is pronounced [h] and represents the lenition of s; for example mo shaol [mə heːɫ] "my life" (cf. saol [sˠeːɫ] "life").

Occitan

In Occitan, sh represents [ʃ]. It mostly occurs in the Gascon dialect of Occitan and corresponds with s or ss in other Occitan dialects: peish = peis "fish", naishença = naissença "birth", sheis = sièis "six". A i before sh is silent: peish, naishença are pronounced [ˈpeʃ, naˈʃensɔ]. Some words have sh in all Occitan dialects: they are Gascon words adopted in all the Occitan language (Aush "Auch", Arcaishon "Arcachon") or foreign borrowings (shampó "shampoo").

For s·h, see Interpunct#Occitan.

Other languages

Somali

Sh represents the sound [ʃ] in the Somali Latin Alphabet.^[1] It is considered a separate letter, and is the 9th letter of the alphabet.

Uyghur

Sh represents the sound [ʃ] in the Uyghur Latin script. It is considered a separate letter, and is the 14th letter of the alphabet.

Uzbek

In Uzbek, the letter sh represents [ʃ]. It is the 27th letter of the Uzbek alphabet.

Romanization

In the Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and Yale romanizations of Chinese, sh represents retroflex [ʂ]. It contrasts with [ɕ], which is written x in Pinyin, hs in Wade-Giles, and sy in Yale.

In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, sh represents [ɕ]. Other romanizations write [ɕ] as s before i and sy before other vowels.

International auxiliary languages

Ido

In Ido, sh represents [ʃ].

References

1. David D., Laitin (1977-01-01). Politics, language, and thought: the Somali experience. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226467910.