- Shcha
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Heading=Cyrillic letter Shcha
uuc=0429|ulc=0449Shcha 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 ofsha 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 . Inlinguistics , its Russian pronunciation is usually transliterated as "šč" (withháček s), 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 thetetragraph "shch" (reflecting the traditional pronunciation), but in German it requires seven letters: "schtsch". This gave rise to a popular joke aboutCatherine the Great , a Russiantsarina 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 letterЩ . "Ş " is a rarely used single-letter alternative.Fact|date=December 2007ee also
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