Ezh (letter)
Encyclopedia
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
(IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative
Voiced postalveolar fricative
The voiced palato-alveolar fricative or voiced domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Z. An alternative symbol used in some...
consonant. It is also called the "tailed z". Example: vision ˈvɪʒən. It is pronounced as the "s" in "treasure" or the "si" in the word "precision". (See also the Persian alphabet letter ژ
Že
Že is a letter in the Perso-Arabic alphabet, based on with two additional diacritic dots. It is used in Persian, Kurdish, other Iranian languages and Urdu but not in Arabic. It is used to represent the sound ....
.)
Ezh is used as a letter in some orthographies of Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami
Skolt Sami is a Uralic, Sami language spoken by approximately 400 speakers in Finland, mainly in Sevettijärvi, and approximately 20–30 speakers of the Njuõˊttjäuˊrr dialect in an area surrounding Lake Lovozero in Russia. Skolt Sami used to also be spoken on the Neiden area of Norway,...
, both by itself, and with a caron
Caron
A caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...
. These denote partially voiced alveolar and post-alveolar affricates, respectively, broadly represented /dz/. It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, for example in the Aja language
Aja language (Niger-Congo)
The Aja language is a Gbe language of the Niger–Congo language spoken by the Aja people; and it is closely related to other Gbe languages such as Ewe, Mina, Fon, and Phla Phera.-Aja:...
of Benin
Benin
Benin , officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It borders Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east and Burkina Faso and Niger to the north. Its small southern coastline on the Bight of Benin is where a majority of the population is located...
and the Daghbani language of Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
, where the uppercase variant looks like a reflected sigma (Σ
Sigma
Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the 'S' sound. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 200. When used at the end of a word, and the word is not all upper case, the final form is used, e.g...
).
Origin
As a phonetic symbol, ezh originates with Isaac PitmanIsaac Pitman
Sir Isaac Pitman , knighted in 1894, developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known now as Pitman shorthand. He first proposed this in Stenographic Soundhand in 1837. Pitman was a qualified teacher and taught at a private school he founded in Wotton-under-Edge...
's alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. The symbol is based on medieval cursive forms of Latin z
Z
Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal...
, evolving into the blackletter
Blackletter
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
z letter. In Unicode, however, the blackletter z ("tailed z", German geschwänztes Z) is considered a glyph variant of z, and not an ezh.
In contexts where "tailed z" is used in contrast to tail-less z, notably in standard transcription of Middle High German
Middle High German
Middle High German , abbreviated MHG , is the term used for the period in the history of the German language between 1050 and 1350. It is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German...
, Unicode is sometimes used, strictly speaking incorrectly. Unicode offers "z with hook" as a grapheme for Middle High German coronal fricative instead.
Ezh as an abbreviation for dram
In UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, a standard designed to allow symbols from all writing systems to be represented and manipulated by computers, the ezh (alternatively ℨ) is used as the symbol to represent the abbreviation for dram
Dram (unit)
The dram was historically both a coin and a weight. Currently it is both a small mass in the Apothecaries' system of weights and a small unit of volume...
, an apothecaries' system
Apothecaries' system
The apothecaries' system of weights is a historical system of mass units that were used by physicians and apothecaries for medical recipes, and also sometimes by scientists. The English version of the system is closely related with the English troy system of weights, the pound and grain being...
unit
Units of measurement
A unit of measurement is a definite magnitude of a physical quantity, defined and adopted by convention and/or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same physical quantity. Any other value of the physical quantity can be expressed as a simple multiple of the unit of...
of mass
Mass
Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...
.
Ezh and yogh
In Unicode 1.0, the character was unified with the unrelated character yoghYogh
The letter yogh , was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing y and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Old English form of the letter g.In Middle English writing, tailed z came to be indistinguishable from yogh....
, which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Historically, ezh is derived from Latin z
Z
Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal...
, while yogh is derived from Latin g
G
G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...
. The characters do look very similar, and do not appear alongside each other in any alphabet. To better differentiate between the two, the Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
and the Early English Text Society
Early English Text Society
The Early English Text Society is an organization to reprint early English texts, especially those only available in manuscript. Most of its volumes are in Middle English and Old English...
extend the uppermost tip of the 'yogh' into a little curvature upward.
Ezh and the digit three
The capital ezh looks similar to the common form of the figure three (3). To differentiate between the two characters, Ezh includes the sharp zigzag of the letter z, while the number is usually curved.Still, there is a slightly different form of the Arabic numeral three called banker's three, which looks like the ezh. Its origin is that bankers did not want forgers to turn the 3's in a check into 8's, so the top is angled.
Ezh and hiragana ro
Ezh looks similar to ろRo (kana)
ろ, in hiragana, or ロ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. The hiragana is written in one stroke, katakana in three. Both represent the sound and both have origins from the Chinese character 呂...
, the Japanese hiragana letter for the mora
Mora (linguistics)
Mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. As with many technical linguistic terms, the definition of a mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D...
"ro." However, the central corner of ろ points out further away to the left than that of ezh.
Furthermore, the hiragana for "ru" is る, appearing identical to ろ except for the spiral at the end.
See also
- Abkhazian DzeAbkhazian DzeAbkhazian Dze is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is used in the Abkhazian language where it represents the voiced alveolar affricate , pronounced like ⟨ds⟩ in "pods"....
(Ӡ ӡ) - Cyrillic ZeZe (Cyrillic)Ze is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative , like the pronunciation of ⟨z⟩ in "zoo".Ze is romanized using the Latin letter ⟨z⟩....
(З з)