Esh (letter)
Esh is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script. Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative. It is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in the alphabets of some African languages.
The letter esh can be inserted using unofficial "English " layout: uppercase Ʃ can be inserted with while lowercase ʃ is.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses to represent a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant. Related obsolete IPA characters include,, and.
is used in the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system.
Variations of esh are used for other phonetic transcription: ᶋ ᶘ ᶴ.
