Sho (letter)

The letter (þ, sometimes called "sho" or "san") was a letter added to the Greek alphabet in order to write the Bactrian language. It was similar in appearance to the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic letter thorn , although both are historically quite unrelated. The letter thorn is typically used for transcribing it in modern print. It probably represented a sound similar to English "sh" (). Its conventional transliteration in Latin is "š".

Its original name and position in the Bactrian alphabet, if it had any, are unknown. Some authors have called it "san", on the basis of the hypothesis that it was a survival or reintroduction of the archaic Greek letter San. It closely resembles, perhaps coincidentally, a letter of the Greek-based Carian alphabet which may have also stood for . The name "sho" was coined for the letter for purposes of modern computer encoding in 2002, on the basis of analogy with "rho" (ρ), the letter with which it seems to be graphically related. Ϸ was added to Unicode in version 4.0 (2003), in an uppercase and lowercase character designed for modern typography.

References

ϷSchoSho شۆ ϷϷ
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