Shcha

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Heading=Cyrillic letter Shcha


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Shcha or Shta (Щ, щ, italics: "Щ, щ") is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, historically representing the consonant cluster IPA|/ɕʨ/ or, more commonly, IPA|/ɕɕ/ in Russian, IPA|/ʃʧ/ in Ukrainian and Rusyn, and the consonant cluster IPA|/ʃt/ in Bulgarian. Originally, this letter was a ligature of sha and te (Ш + Т = Щ), with the descender in the middle of the sha, and is descended from the Glagolitic letter Shta: .

This letter is the most troublesome for romanization. In linguistics, its Russian pronunciation is usually transliterated as "šč" (with háčeks), and used to be pronounced as in the phrase "fresh cheese," although in the modern Russian it is pronounced as "shsh." ("wash sheep"). In English, it is typically transcribed with the tetragraph "shch" (reflecting the traditional pronunciation), but in German it requires seven letters: "schtsch". This gave rise to a popular joke about Catherine the Great, a Russian tsarina of German origin, that she managed to make eight spelling mistakes in the two-letter word Щи ("shchi", 'cabbage soup'), since the word in German is rendered "schtschi".

The letter Ŝ is used in Table A of (standard of transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters) for letter Щ. "Ş" is a rarely used single-letter alternative.Fact|date=December 2007

ee also

*Ш, ш - Sha (Cyrillic)