S-comma

Appearance of comma (upper row) and cedilla (lower row) in the Times New Roman font.

S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the Romanian language sound /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe).

This letter however was not part of the early Unicode versions, and not in the predecessors like ISO/IEC_8859-2 and Windows-1250, which is why Ş (S-cedilla) is often used in digital texts in Romanian. S-cedilla was introduced for computers for the sake of the Turkish language, and later it was used unchanged also for the Romanian language. It was less of a problem then, since the screens and printouts had less resolution and newspapers and books would use a suitable font anyway.

S-comma was introduced only in Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian national standardization body, but most computers today still do not have fonts compatible with it. Computers with Microsoft operating systems older than Windows XP do not have compatible fonts. Windows XP does not support this letter out of the box, but it is possible to install European Union Expansion Font Update which add support for this letter. For this reason, almost all Romanian texts still use S-cedilla (or even S), despite the recommendation to migrate from cedilla to comma.

The letter is placed in Unicode in the Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", as the "capital letter S with comma" (U+0218) and "small letter s with comma" (U+0219).^[1] In HTML these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

The letter was proposed in the Buda Lexicon, a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi and Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române, introducing ș for /ʃ/ and ț for /ts/.^[2]

Use of the comma with the letter S

• Romanian
  • The Romanian letter Ș/ș (S with comma) represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in "show"). On outdated systems which do not support the glyph, the symbol Ş/ş (S with cedilla) is used. Example word: Timișoara.

See also

• T-comma
• D-comma

References