Alphabet Letters
Shta Щ
Cyrillic Letters
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Origin Developed in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire
Shta is the twenty-eighth letter of Cyrillic and writes the cluster sht, a sequence Slavonic used constantly and Greek could not supply. It has no numeral value. Its Cyrillic shape makes its composition visible on the page, being the letter for sh with the letter for t joined beneath it, and that transparency is unusual: most of the Slavic-only letters give no account of themselves in their shapes. The sound it records varies by recension, remaining sht in Bulgarian Church Slavonic and corresponding to other clusters in the East Slavic and Serbian recensions, so it is one of the letters that identifies the tradition a manuscript belongs to.
Facts
Open Questions
Historical OriginShta is plainly built on sha, but whether the element below it is the Cyrillic letter tverdo, making shta a Cyrillic ligature, or whether the whole sign was taken from the Glagolitic letter for the same cluster and redrawn to match sha, is argued. Both accounts are current and the shape is compatible with either.
No comparison of the earliest attested forms of shta across the Cyrillic recensions has yet found a period or region where the two elements are still drawn separately, which would settle the ligature reading, or forms too remote from sha and tverdo to be a ligature at all. Origin of the NameNot established for this letter's own name
Shta's own description discusses the cluster sht it writes and its transparent construction, not the origin of its name, and gives none. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion. Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name
Shta's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion. Attributions
Associated SoundThe cluster sht, written as a single sign 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Origins
Origin PeriodDeveloped in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the death of Constantine-Cyril, in the First Bulgarian Empire 2 Place of OriginThe First Bulgarian Empire, in the school of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, with Preslav and Ohrid the two centres most often named 2 Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: one letter to a sound, built on Greek uncial letterforms with additional signs, several of them taken from Glagolitic, for the Slavonic sounds Greek could not write 1 PositionThe twenty-eighth letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: Early Cyrillic, the alphabet of Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceShta's Cyrillic shape shows its own construction openly, the sign for sh with the sign for t joined beneath it, an unusual transparency most of the script's Slavic-only letters do not share; the sound it records varies by recension, which makes the letter one of the marks that identifies which tradition a given manuscript follows. 1 Learn More
Shta: A Letter for a Cluster
Shta stands twenty eighth and writes the cluster sht. It carries no numeral value.
It is unusual in what it represents. Most letters write a single sound; this one writes a sequence of two, and the sequence it writes was the regular Old Church Slavonic outcome of certain inherited consonant groups. Giving that outcome a letter of its own is a decision about the language as much as about the script: it treats a cluster as a unit because the grammar treats it as one, appearing where a related word has a different consonant entirely.
The shape is built on sha. Whether it is a ligature assembled inside Cyrillic from sha and tverdo, or the Glagolitic sign for the same cluster redrawn to match the Cyrillic sha, is genuinely argued, and the argument is recorded on the relation to the Glagolitic letter.
Its later history is the most divided of any letter in the alphabet, because the cluster it names developed differently in different Slavic languages while the letter stayed put. What a Bulgarian reads and what a Russian reads are not the same sequence of sounds, and the companion article takes that up. In both languages, and in several others, the letter is still in daily use.
It is also one of the small number of Cyrillic letters that descend below the baseline. That is a typographic fact with practical consequences: a script whose letters have descenders needs more room between lines than one whose letters do not, and Cyrillic type is set more loosely than Greek partly for this reason. In the earliest hands the lower element sat closer to the body of the letter, and its migration downward and to the right happened gradually across the manuscript centuries before the first printers fixed it in metal.
One Letter, Two Languages
Shta is the clearest case in the alphabet of a single sign that means different things in different countries, and the divergence is not a corruption of one by the other. Both are regular outcomes of the same inherited material.
In Bulgarian the letter is read as the cluster sht, which is what it was named for and what Old Church Slavonic had. Bulgarian is the modern language closest to the recorded Slavonic here, and its letter name is still built on the sound.
In Russian the same letter writes a long soft sh, historically the cluster shch, and Russian names the letter accordingly. The difference goes back to a divergence in how the inherited consonant groups developed in the south Slavic and the east Slavic areas, a divergence older than any of the modern national languages.
Two consequences follow. The first is practical: a Slavonic word read aloud in Sofia and in Moscow will differ audibly at exactly this letter, which is one of the reasons the pronunciation of Church Slavonic is not uniform across the Orthodox world. The second is evidential: because the divergence is regular, the treatment of this letter in a manuscript is a piece of information about where the manuscript was written, and Slavists use it that way.
A shared alphabet conceals differences of this kind rather than removing them, which is a general property of writing systems and a specific reason to be careful about reading a Slavonic text aloud in one national tradition and calling it the original.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Shta is built on sha, whether as a ligature of sha and tverdo or as a Glagolitic sign redrawn to match sha. That it is built on sha is agreed; which of the two accounts is right is recorded on the Glagolitic link.
Why this is disputed. Shta writes the consonant cluster sht and is usually read as built from Cyrillic sha with an added stroke rather than borrowed as a whole new shape from Glagolitic, which has its own, differently constructed shta. Whether the Cyrillic sign is best described as derived from the Glagolitic letter at all, rather than assembled locally from Cyrillic's own sha, is exactly the kind of case where letter by letter derivation claims break down and scholars differ.
Originates in Language
Shta is a letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which was assembled to write Old Church Slavonic and which takes its letter names from that language.
Related To
Cyrillic Shta writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter. Which of the two Slavonic scripts came first, and how much either owes the other, is argued rather than settled.
Shta answers to Glagolitic Shta: the same sound and the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter.
Sources
Open Questions (2 open questions)
Did the opaque letter names at the end of the Slavic alphabets, fert, kher, tsy and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?
The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.
What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
Is shta a ligature built inside Cyrillic, or a Glagolitic sign redrawn?
The letter is plainly built on sha. Whether the element below it is the letter tverdo, making the letter a Cyrillic ligature, or whether the whole sign was taken from the Glagolitic letter for the same cluster and redrawn to match sha, is argued. Both accounts are current and the shape is compatible with either.
What would resolve this A close comparison of the earliest attested forms of the letter across the recensions, looking for a period or region in which the two elements are still drawn separately, which would settle the ligature reading, or for early forms too remote from sha and tverdo to be a ligature at all.
Slavic palaeographyDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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