Sh (digraph)

The digraph/letter Sh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, which is written as a combination of S and H.

Sh digraph

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 digraph 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⟩ represents [h] and marks the lenition of ⟨s⟩; for example mo shaol [mˠə hiːlˠ] "my life" (cf. saol [sˠiːlˠ] "life").

Ladino

In Judaeo-Spanish, sh represents [ʃ] and occurs in both native words (debasho, ‘under’) and foreign ones (shalom, ‘hello’). In the Hebrew script it is written ש.

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". An 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.

Spanish

In Spanish, sh represents [ʃ] almost only in foreign origin words, as flash, show, shuara or geisha. Royal Spanish Academy recommends adapting in both spelling and pronunciation with s, adapting to common pronunciation in peninsular dialect. Nevertheless, in American dialects it is frequently pronounced [t͡ʃ].^[1]

Other languages

Somali

Sh represents the sound [ʃ] in the Somali Latin Alphabet.^[2] 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.

Finnish and Estonian

In Finnish and Estonian, sh is used in place of š to represent [ʃ] when the accented character is unavailable.

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. Royal Spanish Academy. Ortografía de la lengua española (2010). (in spanish), pp. 127-128
2. David D., Laitin (1977-01-01). Politics, language, and thought: the Somali experience. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226467910.