𐳥

esz

a sound, not a word

The plain s, which is not what Latin readers expect

Glyphs are shown in Unicode and laid out left to right. Both scripts are written right to left, so these rows are a convenience rather than a facsimile.

Sound
sz /s/
Position
34
Group
Consonants
Unicode
U+10CE5

A trap for anyone reading Hungarian

Hungarian orthography does something that catches out almost every learner: s is the sh-sound, and sz is the plain s.

So Budapest has an sh in it. And the Hungarian for hundred, száz, opens with an ordinary s despite being spelled with what looks like a digraph.

Rovás has separate single characters for both, which removes the confusion entirely at the level of writing — though of course it does nothing about the fact that Latin-alphabet Hungarian will continue to trip people up.

One sound, one letter

Esz is /s/ and es is /ʃ/, and each is a single character with no relationship to the other in shape. There is no digraph and nothing to parse.

That is the general principle of the script, and this pair is where it is most obviously useful, because the Latin convention here is not merely long but actively misleading.

Frequently asked questions

Reversed from what most European readers expect: s is the sh-sound /ʃ/, and sz is the plain s /s/. So Budapest contains an sh. Rovás gives each its own single character.

It is a historical convention of Hungarian orthography rather than a phonetic necessity. Rovás sidesteps it by having one character per sound, so nothing needs parsing.

No. Rovás letters are purely phonetic. Their names — eb, ec, ed and so on — are recitation aids, the consonant with a leading vowel, not words. There is no rune poem, no kenning tradition and no ideographic layer, which puts the script in a weaker position for divination than the Germanic runes.

Rovás

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