From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Z
Z
Phoenician Etruscan Greek
zayin Z zeta
sented either z as in English and French, or possibly more
like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).
Basic Latin alphabet Greek
Aa Bb Cc Dd The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician
symbol I, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in
Ee Ff Gg Hh this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it
Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn zeta, a new name made in imitation of eta (η) and theta (θ).
In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the
Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt
letter seems to have represented /dz/; in Attic, from the
Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz 4th century BC onwards, it seems to have been either
/zd/ or a /dz/, and in fact there is no consensus concern-
Z (named zed /ˈzɛd/ or zee /ˈziː/)[1] is the twenty-sixth ing this issue. In other dialects, as Elean and Cretan, the
and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling
the English voiced and unvoiced th (IPA /ð/ and /θ/, re-
Name and pronunciation spectively). In the common dialect (κοινη) that succeed-
ed the older dialects, ζ became /z/, as it remains in mod-
In most dialects of English, the letter’s name is zed ( ern Greek.
/ˈzɛd/) reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but
in American English, its name is zee ( /ˈziː/), deriving Etruscan
from a late 17th century English dialectal form.[2] In Etruscan, Z may have represented /ts/.
Other languages spell the letter’s name in a similar
way: zeta in Italian and in Spanish, zäta in Swedish, zet Latin
in Dutch, Polish, German, Romanian and Czech, zæt in
In Old Latin, the consonant /z/ (written s) developed into
Danish, zett in Norwegian, zède in French, and zê in Por-
/r/ by rhotacism and a symbol for /z/ became useless. It
tuguese.
was therefore removed from the alphabet around 300 BC
Several languages lacking the /z/ phoneme render it
by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus, and a new letter,
as /ts/, e.g. zeta /tsetɑ/ or /tset/ in Finnish. In Chinese
G, was put in its place soon thereafter.
(Mandarin) pinyin the name of the letter Z is pronounced
In the 1st century BC, Z was introduced again at the
[tsɨ], although the English zed and zee have become very
end of the Latin alphabet to accurately represent the
common.
sound of the Greek zeta. The letter Z appeared only in
Another English dialectal form is izzard ( /ˈɪzərd/).
Greek words, and is the only letter besides Y that the Ro-
It dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives
mans took directly from Greek, rather than from Etrus-
from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, whose reconstruct-
can.
ed Latin form would be *idzēta,[1] perhaps a popular form
Earlier zeta was transliterated as s at the beginning
with a prosthetic vowel.
and ss in the middle of words, as in sōna for ζώνη "belt"
and trapessita for τραπεζίτης "banker".
History In Vulgar Latin, Greek zeta seems to have represented
(IPA /dj/), and later (IPA /dz/); d replaced /z/ in words
Semitic like baptidiare for baptizare "baptize", while conversely Z
The name of the Semitic symbol was zayin, possibly appears for /di/ in forms like zaconus, zabulus, for dia-
meaning "weapon", and was the seventh letter. It repre- conus "deacon", diabulus, "devil". Z was also written for
the consonant J, which changed from an approximant in
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Z
Latin to a fricative in the Romance languages, as in zunior
for junior "younger".
Last letter of the alphabet
In earlier times, the English alphabets used by children
terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic
symbols. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot
refers to Z being followed by & when she makes Jacob
Storey say, "He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish
off th’ alphabet like; though ampusand would ha’ done as
well, for what he could see."[3]
Blackletter Z
A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic
minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces
is the "tailed z" (German geschwänztes Z, also Z mit Unter-
schlinge). In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present
as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Together with long
s (ſ), it is the origin of the ß ligature in the German alpha-
bet.
Z in an Antiqua typeface may be identical with the
character representing 3 in other fonts.
A graphical variant of tailed Z is Ezh, as adopted into
the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the
voiced postalveolar fricative.
Unicode assigns codepoints for "BLACK-LETTER
CAPITAL Z" and "FRAKTUR SMALL Z" in the Letterlike
Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols
ranges, at U+2128 Z and U+1D537 ?, respectively.
Usage
In Italian, Z represents two phonemes, /ts/ and /dz/; in
German, it stands for /ts/; in Castilian Spanish it repre-
sents /θ/ (as English th in thing), though in other dialects
(Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with
/s/.
English
Early English used S alone for both the unvoiced and
the voiced sibilant. The Latin sound imported through
French was new and was not written with Z but with G
or I. The successive changes can be well seen in the dou-
ble forms from the same original, jealous and zealous. Both
of these come from a late Latin zelosus, derived from the
imported Greek ζῆλος zêlos. The earlier form is jealous;
its initial sound is the [dʒ] which developed to Modern
French [ʒ]. John Wycliffe wrote the word as gelows or
ielous.
Z at the end of a word was pronounced ts, as in Eng-
• lowercase cursive z lish assets, from Old French asez "enough" (Modern
• z in a sans serif typeface French assez), from Vulgar Latin ad satis ("to sufficien-
cy").[4]
Z represents /ʒ/ in words like azure, seizure. More of-
ten, this sound appears as su or si in words such as mea-
2
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Z
sure, decision, etc. In all these words, /ʒ/ developed from
earlier /zj/ by yod-coalescence.
Computing codes
Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin with Alternative representations of Z
Z, though it occurs in words beginning with other letters. NATO phonetic Morse code
It is the most rarely used letter in written English.[5] Zulu ––··
It is more common in American English than in British
English, as with the endings -ize/-ise and -ization/-isation,
where the American spelling is derived from Greek and
the British from French. One native Germanic English
word that contains z, freeze (past froze, participle frozen)
came to be spelled that way by convention, even though
it could have been spelled with s (as with choose, chose,
chosen). Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille
Zzz or zzzz is used in writing to represent the act of In Unicode, the capital Z is codepoint U+005A and the
sleeping. It is used because human snoring often sounds lower case z is U+007A.
like the pronunciation of the letter.[citation needed] The EBCDIC code for capital Z is 233 and for lowercase
z is 169.
Finnish The numeric character references in HTML and XML
In Finnish, Z is pronounced /ts/. Officially the sound [z] are "Z" and "z" for upper and lower case re-
would appear in certain select loanwords such as azeri, spectively.
but in practice [z] is heard and pronounced as /s/ in such
words. The use of Z to denote /ts/ is discouraged in offi- Zh
cial language, as in the case of pitsa ("pizza").
Zh is used in English to transliterate the Cyrillic letter
Chinese Ж, for instance in the surnames of Leonid Brezhnev and
Marshal Zhukov.
In Chinese (Mandarin) pinyin ‹z› is pronounced [ts]
In English-transliterated Tamil script, zh is used to
ds
(unaspirated pinyin ‹c› - "halfway" between beds and
represent ழ U+0BB4 (ḻ, [ɹ]).
ts).
bets
Japanese See also
In the Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn romanisations of Ja- • Zed
panese, ‹z› stands for a phoneme whose allophones in- • Zee
clude [z] and [dz] • Zeta
• Ezh
International Phonetic Alphabet • Zzz
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses [z] for the • З, з - Ze (Cyrillic)
voiced alveolar sibilant.
Polish
References
[1] ^ "Z" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989);
Z is used in six of the seven officially recognized digraphs
Merriam-Webster’s Third New International
in the Polish language, and is the most frequently used of
[2] One early use of "zee": Lye, Thomas (1969) [2nd ed.,
the consonants in that language.
London, 1677]. A new spelling book, 1677. Menston,
(Yorks.) Scolar P.. p. 24. LCCN 70-407159. "Zee Za-
Icelandic
cha-ry, Zion, zeal"
Z was replaced with s in Icelandic in 1973, as in íslenska [3] George Eliot: Adam Bede. Chapter XXI. online at
"Icelandic (language)" (formerly íslenzka in Old Ice- Project Gutenberg
landic). Here the combination of the d of Ísland and the s [4] "asset". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University
of -(i)sk was spelled z, representing ts. Press. 2nd ed. 1989.
[5] English letter frequencies
Mathematics
In mathematics, boldface Z or blackboard bold
is used to denote the set of integers.
U+2124
External links
• James Grout: Appius Claudius Caecus and the Letter Z,
part of the Encyclopædia Romana
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Z
Źź Ẑẑ Žž Żż Ẓẓ Ẕẕ Ƶƶ Ȥȥ Ⱬⱬ ᵶ ᶎ ʐ ʑ ɀ
The ISO basic Latin alphabet Related
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss • Uu Vv • Diacritics • Zz
Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn History • PalaeographyTt DerivationsWw Xx Yy Punctuation • Numer
Letter Z with diacritics
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z"
Categories: ISO basic Latin letters
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