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Not to be confused with the Cyrillic letters Sha or Shha, the Latin letter Schwa, or the Latin tetragraph Shch.
Shcha, from the Alphabet Book оf the Red Army Soldier (1921). The illustration depicts щук (shchuk), “pike” (acc. pl.).

Shcha (Щ щ; italics: Щ щ or Щ щ; italics: Щ щ), Shta, or Scha is a letter of the Cyrillic script.[1]

In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt/ and is named Shta.

While in the Russian the letter ⟨щ⟩ represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕː/, similar to the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in “sheep”, in the Ukrainian and Rusyn, ⟨щ⟩ represents the consonant cluster /ʃt͡ʃ/ (a hard ⟨sh⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩, as in “borscht”). This pronunciation preserves the historical character of ⟨щ⟩ as a combination of sounds, consistent with its Old Church Slavonic origins, unlike the modern Russian pronunciation.[2] The official Ukrainian transliteration system renders the letter as ⟨shch⟩, reflecting this two-component structure.[3] This is also reflected in Belarusian, where the letter ⟨щ⟩ was abolished in favour of the phonetic spelling ⟨шч⟩ to represent the similar sound cluster /ʂt͡ʂ/.[4]

Most other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter for loanwords or foreign names; in these contexts, it is often pronounced /ʃ/, an approximation of the Russian pronunciation.[citation needed]

In English, ⟨щ⟩ is romanized as ⟨shch⟩, ⟨ŝ⟩, ⟨šč⟩ or occasionally as ⟨sch⟩.[5] English-speaking learners are often instructed to pronounce it as a cluster, although this no longer reflects the standard modern Russian phonetic realization.[citation needed]

History

Cyrillic Щ (Early Cyrillic form: ) is derived from the Glagolitic letter shta Ⱋ,[6] which was a ligature of sha Ⱎ (= Cyrillic Ш, pronounced [ʃ]), and tverdo Ⱅ (= Cyrillic Т, pronounced [t]).[7] The original pronunciation, [ʃt], is maintained in Bulgarian.

This letter was also used in the Komi language as /t͡ʃ/, but it has fallen out of use in favour of digraph ⟨тш⟩.

Form

The form of the letter shcha is considered to have originated as a ligature of the letters Ш and Т.[8] 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.

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

References

  1. ^ “Cyrillic script”. omniglot.com. Retrieved 2022-06-21.
  2. ^ Shevelov, George Y. (1979). A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. pp. 624–626. ISBN 978-3533027874.
  3. ^ “Table of transliteration of the Ukrainian alphabet by means of the Latin alphabet”. Official website of the Parliament of Ukraine. Retrieved 2024-05-20.
  4. ^ Mayo, P. (1993). “Belarusian”. In Comrie, B.; Corbett, G. G. (eds.). The Slavonic Languages. Routledge. pp. 890–891.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ Schenker, Alexander M. (1995). The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 179. ISBN 0-300-05846-2.
  8. ^ Chodzko, Alexandre; Chodźko, Aleksander Borejko (1869). Grammaire paléoslave, suivie de textes paléoslaves (in French). [s. n.] – via Oxford University collection.
  • Wiktionary logo The dictionary definition of Щ at Wiktionary
  • Wiktionary logo The dictionary definition of щ at Wiktionary