History of the Greek alphabet only required one. The history here is complicated, but basically "sāmekh" dropped out in certain dialects, and was reused to represent in others, while usage for the sound varied between "ṣādē" and "šin". The letter now known as sigma took its name from "sāmekh" but its form from "šin", while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from "šin" but its place in the alphabet from "ṣādē". A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate, such as . For the special case of zeta, see Zeta
Esh (letter) Esh (letter) Esh (majuscule: Ʃ Unicode U+01A9, minuscule: ʃ Unicode U+0283) is a character used in conjunction with the Latin script. Its lowercase form ʃ is similar to a long s ſ or an integral sign ∫; in 1928 the Africa Alphabet borrowed the Greek letter Sigma for the uppercase form Ʃ, but more recently the African reference alphabet discontinued it, using the lowercase esh only. The lowercase form was introduced by Isaac Pitman in his 1847 Phonotypic Alphabet to represent the voiceless postalveolar fricative (English "sh"). It is today used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as in