Lettersë

Lettersë is a fictional grapheme described in the constructed language Sëlan. It is formed by the Latin letter s with a diaeresis diacritic, commonly written as s̈. In Sëlan orthography, lettersë is treated as a distinct letter separate from plain s, used to encode a specific sibilant sound.

Phonology and usage: The phoneme associated with lettersë is a voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate, commonly realized as [t͡s]. It contrasts with the plain /s/ found in other words. Lettersë typically appears in word-initial and stressed syllables, and it also occurs in some loanwords borrowed from neighboring languages. In dialectal variation, realizations may shift toward [ɕ] in certain phonetic environments.

Orthography and encoding: There is no dedicated Unicode code point for lettersë. In plain text, it is written as the base letter s followed by a combining diaeresis, rendered as s̈ (U+0073 followed by U+0308). Some fonts depict lettersë as a ligature, but such representations are font-specific. When ported to ASCII or systems without diacritics, editors often transliterate lettersë as "ts" to preserve the sound.

History and occurrence: The concept of lettersë was introduced in linguistic discussions of Sëlan by theorists exploring how to represent novel sibilants in Latin-based scripts. It has appeared in scholarly sketches, educational materials, and fan-created literature about the language, where it helps readers distinguish a distinct sibilant from ordinary s.

Examples in Sëlan text: s̈ara and s̈el are cited examples illustrating lettersë, intended to correspond to the [t͡s] sound in context. In transliteration, words containing lettersë are commonly rendered as “ts” to aid pronunciation for readers unfamiliar with diacritics.