Ezh is also used as a letter in some orthographies of Laz and Skolt Sami, both by itself, and with a caron (⟨Ǯ⟩ ⟨ǯ⟩). In Laz, these represent voiceless alveolar affricate/ts/ and its ejective counterpart /tsʼ/, respectively. In Skolt Sami they respectively denote partially voiced alveolar and post-alveolar affricates, broadly represented /dz/ and /dʒ/. It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, for example in the Aja language of Benin and the Dagbani language of Ghana, where the uppercase variant looks like a reflected sigma ⟨Σ⟩. It also appears in the orthography of Uropi.
Origin
As a phonetic symbol, it originates with Isaac Pitman's English Phonotypic Alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. The symbol is based on medieval cursive forms of Latin ⟨z⟩, evolving into the blackletter ⟨z⟩ letter. In Unicode, however, the blackletter ⟨z⟩ ("tailed z", German geschwänztes Z) is considered a glyph variant of ⟨z⟩, and not an ezh.
Humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino proposed in 1524 a reform of Italian orthography introducing ezh as an uppercase ⟨ç⟩ for the [dz] sound.[1]
In contexts where "tailed z" is used in contrast to tail-less z, notably in standard transcription of Middle High German, Unicode ⟨ʒ⟩ is sometimes used, strictly speaking incorrectly. Unicode offers ⟨ȥ⟩ "z with hook" as a grapheme for Middle High German coronal fricative instead.
In Unicode 1.0, the character was unified with the unrelated character yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩, which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Historically, ezh is derived from Latin ⟨z⟩, but yogh is derived from Latin ⟨g⟩ by way of insular G. The characters look very similar and do not appear alongside each other in any alphabet. To differentiate between the two more clearly, the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society extend the uppermost tip of the yogh into a little curvature upward.[citation needed]
Numeral three
The 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. Some typefaces use a form of ⟨3⟩ with a flat top, very similar (or virtually identical) to an ezh.[citation needed]
In handwritten Cyrillic, the numeral ⟨3⟩ is sometimes written in a form similar to the ezh, so as to distinguish it from the letter ze ⟨З⟩.[citation needed]
The Cyrillic letter ze ⟨З з⟩ has a similar body to Ezh and the Abkhazian dze ⟨Ӡ ӡ⟩. As customary, the Cyrillic script has a stiffer structure, but both letters have common roots in historical cursive forms of the Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ ζ⟩.[citation needed]
However, Latin ezh and Cyrillic ze represent different phonemes: the former generally represents /ʒ/, while the latter represents stands for /z/. Cyrillic uses zhe ⟨Ж ж⟩ for the /ʒ/ phoneme.[citation needed]
Usage
The two West African forms of the capital letter ezh
Language orthographies
Trissino's reform did not prosper in relation to the ⟨z⟩.
In the IPA it represents the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example: vision/ˈvɪʒən/. It is pronounced as the ⟨s⟩ in "treasure" or the ⟨si⟩ in the word "precision".
It is used in the "International Standard" orthography, as devised by Marcel Courthiade for Romani.
It was also used in an obsolete Latin alphabet for writing Komi, where it represented [d͡ʑ] (similar to English ⟨j⟩). In the modern Cyrillic alphabet, this sound is written as "дз".
In Unicode, a standard designed to allow symbols from all writing systems to be represented and manipulated by computers, the ezh is also used as the symbol to represent the abbreviation for dram or drachm, an apothecaries' systemunit of mass.[2] Unicode has no dedicated symbol for dram,[3] but the Unicode code table entry for ezh reads "LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH = dram sign".[4] The upper-case letter z in Blackletter/Fraktur hand, ℨ, is also seen used for dram, but this letter is meant to be used in mathematics and phonetics, and is not recommended as an abbreviation for dram.
Encoding and ligatures
The Unicode code points are U+01B7 for ⟨Ʒ⟩ and U+0292 for ⟨ʒ⟩.
The IPA historically allowed for ezh to be ligatured to other letters; some of these ligatures have been added to the Unicode standard.
Dezh ligatures ezh with the letter D (U+02A4ʤLATIN SMALL LETTER DEZH DIGRAPH).
Lezh ligatures ezh with the letter L (U+026EɮLATIN SMALL LETTER LEZH).
Tezh ligatures ezh with the letter T (U+A728ꜨLATIN CAPITAL LETTER TZ and U+A729ꜩLATIN SMALL LETTER TZ).
Related obsolete IPA characters include U+01BAƺLATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH TAIL and U+0293ʓLATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH CURL.
U+1DBEᶾMODIFIER LETTER SMALL EZH and U+1D9AᶚLATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH RETROFLEX HOOK are also used for phonetic transcription.[5]
