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Ze (Cyrillic)

Ze (З з; italics: З з or <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">З&nbsp;з</span>; italics: <span style="font-family: times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: larger">З&nbsp;з</span>) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative , like the pronunciation of in "zulu".

Ze is romanized using the Latin letter .

The shape of Ze is very similar to the Arabic numeral three , and should not be confused with the Cyrillic letter E .

History and shape

Ze is derived from the Greek letter Zeta (Ζ&nbsp;ζ).

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was (zemlja), meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked similar to a Greek letter Ζ or Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom (). Though a majuscule form of this variant () is encoded in Unicode, historically it was only used as caseless or lowercase.

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Zemlja had a value of 7.

Medieval Cyrillic manuscripts and Church Slavonic printed books have two variant forms of the letter Zemlja: з and . Only the form was used in the oldest ustav (uncial) writing style; з appeared in the later poluustav (half-uncial) manuscripts and typescripts, where the two variants are found at proportions of about 1:1. Some early grammars tried to give a phonetic distinction to these forms (like palatalized vs. nonpalatalized sound), but the system had no further development. Ukrainian scribes and typographers began to regularly use З/з in an initial position, and otherwise (a system in use till the end of the 19th century). Russian scribes and typographers largely abandoned the widespread use of the variant in favor of з in the wake of Patriarch Nikon's reforms. They still used the older form mostly in the case of two З's in row: (the system in use till the mid-18th century).

The civil (Petrine) script knows only one shape of the letter: З/з. This shape is therefore confusing with the number 3, given that the two shapes are very similar to it. However, shapes similar to Z/z can be used in certain stylish typefaces.

In calligraphy and in general handwritten text, lowercase з can be written either fully over the baseline (similar to the printed form) or with the lower half under the baseline and with the loop (for the Russian language, a standard shape since the middle of the 20th century).

Usage

The letter Ze may represent:

  • , the voiced alveolar sibilant (Macedonian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Russian, Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian);
  • , if followed by or any of the palatalizing vowels, as in Russian ();
  • , the voiceless alveolar sibilant (in final position or before voiceless consonants);
  • , if followed by in final position or before voiceless consonants;
  • or (Iron dialect of Ossetian, but in Digoron and Kudairag);
  • clusters and are pronounced in Russian as if they were and , respectively (even if is the last letter of a preposition, like in Russian or );
  • cluster (sometimes also ) is pronounced in Russian as if it was ( , , );
  • cluster can be pronounced (mostly in Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian) as the voiced alveolar affricate (Ukrainian ) or its palatalized form (Belarusian ), but if and belong to different morphemes, then they are pronounced separately. In the standard Iron dialect of Ossetian, this cluster simply stands for ; other dialects treat it as the affricate .
  • , the voiceless alveolar affricate in Mongolian, similar to German .

Other related letters and similar characters

З-shaped Latin letters

Zhuang

A letter that looks like Cyrillic Ze (actually, a stylization of digit 3) was used in the Latin Zhuang alphabet from 1957 to 1986 to represent the third (high) tone. In 1986, it was replaced by .

Computing codes

External links

References