S-comma


S-comma is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound, the voiceless postalveolar fricative.

History

The letter was proposed in the Buda Lexicon, a book published in 1825, which included two texts by Petru Maior, Orthographia romana sive latino-valachica una cum clavi and Dialogu pentru inceputul linbei române, introducing ș for and ț for.

Unicode support

This letter however was not initially supported in early Unicode versions, nor in the predecessors like ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250. Instead, Ş was used for digital texts written in Romanian, a convention that still exists today. In some contexts, like with low-resolution screens and printouts, the visual distinction between ș and ş is minimal.
S-comma was later introduced in Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian national standardization body. Computers with Microsoft operating systems older than Windows XP do not have compatible fonts. Encoding for the S-comma was not supported in retail versions of Windows XP, but the from Microsoft provides the feature. Because of issues with accessibility and convenience, almost all modern Romanian texts still use S-cedilla, despite recommendations to migrate from cedilla to comma.
The letter is part of Unicode's Latin Extended-B range, under "Additions for Romanian", titled as "Latin capital letter S with comma below" and "Latin small letter s with comma below". In HTML, these can be encoded by Ș and ș, respectively.

Use of the comma with the letter ''S''