Ezh (letter)

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Ezh (letter)

Ezh () is a letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet

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 domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages....
consonant. It is also called the "tailed z". Example: vision . It is pronounced as the "s" in "treasure" or the "si" in the word "precision". (See also the Persian alphabet letter ?.)

Ezh is used as a letter in some orthographies of Skolt Sami

Skolt Sami

Skolt Sami is a Finno-Ugric languages, Sami languages language spoken by approximately 400 speakers in Finland, mainly in Sevettij?rvi, and approximately 20–30 speakers of the Nju??ttj?u?rr dialect in an area surrounding Lake Lovozero in Russia....
, both by itself, and with a caron

Caron

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Ezh () is a letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

Voiced postalveolar fricative

Skolt Sami

Caron

A caron or h?cek , 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 consonant pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic languages, Slavic languages, Finno-Lappic languages, and other la...
. These denote partially voiced alveolar and post-alveolar affricates, respectively. It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, for example in the Aja language

Aja language

Aja is a Nilo-Saharan language of the Central Sudanic languages, spoken in the southern Sudanese province of Bahr el Ghazal and along the Sudanese border in the Central African Republic....
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 short coastline to the south leads to the Bight of Benin....
and the Daghbani language of Ghana

Ghana

The Republic of Ghana is a country in West Africa. It borders C?te 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 (S

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....
).

Origin

As a phonetic symbol, ezh originates with Isaac Pitman

Isaac 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....
's alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. The symbol is based on medieval cursive forms of Latin z

Z is the twenty-sixth and final Letter of the modern English alphabet....
, evolving into the blackletter

Blackletter

Blackletter, also known as Gothic scriptor Gothic minuscule, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to 1500....
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 Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character 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 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 imperial 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 apothecary for medical recipes, and also sometimes by scientists....
unit

Units of measurement

The definition, agreement and practical use of units of measurement have played a crucial role in human endeavour from early ages up to this day....
of mass

Mass

In physical science, mass refers to the degree of acceleration a body acquires when subject to a force: bodies with greater mass are accelerated less by the same force....
.

Ezh and yogh

In Unicode 1.0, the character was unified with the unrelated character yogh

Yogh

The letter yogh was used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y and various velar consonant phonemes. Velars are sounds that are usually made when the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate....
, which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Historically, ezh is derived from Latin z

Z is the twenty-sixth and final Letter of the modern English alphabet....
, while yogh is derived from Latin g

G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled gee....
. 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 a publisher and a department of the University of Oxford in England. It is the largest university press in the world, being larger than all the American university presses combined with Cambridge University Press....
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 (number)

----3 is a number, Numeral system, and glyph. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4 ....
(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 (letter)

Origin

Ezh as an abbreviation for dram

Ezh and yogh

Ezh and the digit three

See also

External links