San (letter)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
San (uppercase Ϻ, lowercase ϻ) was a letter of the Greek alphabet, appearing between Pi and Qoppa in alphabetical order, corresponding in position to the Phoenician Tsade 
, but its name comes from Shin. It usually had a phonemic value of /s/, but eventually became disused in favour of sigma. The latest attested use is in the 6th century BC. With a somewhat different shape (which has been labelled "Tsan"[1]) the letter was also used in Arcado-Cypriot as [ts], replacing a previous labio-velar before a front vowel, where other dialects replaced it with Tau.
The Phoenician or the Greek letter was loaned into the Old Italic alphabets (𐌑, transcribed as Ś), in the archaic Etruscan alphabet retaining its M-shape but from the 6th century BC changing its aspect to a shape similar to that of the d-rune 
.
[edit] Computer encoding
| Appearance | Code points | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Ϻ | U+03FA | GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SAN |
| ϻ | U+03FB | GREEK SMALL LETTER SAN |
The Tsan variant has a glyph identical to the Pamphylian Greek digamma, U+0376 U+0377, which is scheduled for inclusion in Unicode 5.1.
[edit] References
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