Shcha (Щ щ; italics: Щ щ), Shta, or Scha is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕː/, similar to the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in Welsh-sheep. In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt͡ʃ/, something like cash-chest. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt/, like the pronunciation of “scht” in Borscht. Most 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 /ʃ/, an approximation of the Russian pronunciation of the letter, and is often omitted when teaching those languages.
In English, Russian Shcha is romanized as ⟨shch⟩, ⟨ŝ⟩, ⟨šč⟩ or occasionally as ⟨sch⟩, 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 letter Shta Ⱋ ().3
The name in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was шта (šta) and is preserved in modern Bulgarian; it is pronounced штъ.
This letter was also used in Komi /t͡ʃ/ (⟨Ч⟩ was & still is used for /t͡ɕ/), which is now represented by the digraph ⟨тш⟩.
Form
The form of the letter shcha is considered to have originated as a ligature of the letters Ш and Т.4 However in later orthographies it began to be depicted as the letter Cyrillic Sha (Ш ш) with a descender. The descender (also used in Ц) has been reinterpreted as a diacritic and used in several letters for non-Slavic languages, such as Ң and Қ.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Ш ш : Cyrillic letter Sha
- С́ с́ : Montenegrin Sje
- Ŝ ŝ : Latin letter Ŝ
- Ś ś : Latin letter Ś
Computing codes
Character information| Preview | Щ | щ | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHCHA | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHCHA | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 1065 | U+0429 | 1097 | U+0449 |
| UTF-8 | 208 169 | D0 A9 | 209 137 | D1 89 |
| Numeric character reference | Щ | Щ | щ | щ |
| Named character reference | Щ | щ | ||
| KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 253 | FD | 221 | DD |
| Code page 855 | 250 | FA | 249 | F9 |
| Code page 866 | 153 | 99 | 233 | E9 |
| Windows-1251 | 217 | D9 | 249 | F9 |
| ISO-8859-5 | 201 | C9 | 233 | E9 |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 153 | 99 | 249 | F9 |
See also
- Mama ŠČ!
- Transliteration table for romanization of Russian, provides versions ⟨ŝ⟩ (note circumflex vs. caron/háček in ⟨šč⟩), ⟨shh⟩
External links
- The dictionary definition of Щ at Wiktionary
- The dictionary definition of щ at Wiktionary
References
"Cyrillic script". omniglot.com. Retrieved 2022-06-21. https://omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm ↩
Maier, Ingrid (2021). "Russian Pronunciation Rules in the Alphabetum Russarum (Stockholm, Peter van Selow)". Slovo: Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures. 62: 39–60. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-462754 ↩
Zhang, Xiangning; Zhang, Ruolin (July 2018). "Evolution of Ancient Alphabet to Modern Greek, Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets and Transcription between Them". Proceedings of the 2018 4th International Conference on Economics, Social Science, Arts, Education and Management Engineering (ESSAEME 2018). Atlantis Press. pp. 156–162. doi:10.2991/essaeme-18.2018.30. ISBN 978-94-6252-549-8. 978-94-6252-549-8 ↩
Chodzko, Alexandre; Chodźko, Aleksander Borejko (1869). Grammaire paléoslave, suivie de textes paléoslaves (in French). [s. n.] – via Oxford University collection. https://archive.org/details/grammairepalosl00chodgoog ↩