Ze (Cyrillic)

Ze (З з; italics: З з) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative /z/, like the pronunciation of ⟨z⟩ in "zoo".

Ze is romanized using the Latin letter ⟨z⟩.

The shape of Ze is very similar to the Arabic numeral three ⟨3⟩ (many cheap models of Cyrillic typewriters even had no individual key for the digit 3 assuming to use uppercase letter З instead) and the Cyrillic letter E ⟨Э⟩.

History and shape

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

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was земля (zemlja), meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked like a Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom (majuscule: Ꙁ, minuscule: ꙁ).

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

Medieval Cyrillic manuscripts and Church Slavonic printed books have two variant forms of the letter Ze: З/з and Ꙁ/ꙁ. Some early grammars tried to give a phonetical distinction to these forms (like palatalized vs. nonpalatalized sound), the system had no further development. Ukrainian scribes and typographers were regularly using З/з in an initial position, and Ꙁ/ꙁ otherwise (a system in use till the end of the 19th century). Typographers from the Great Russia also knew the two shapes, but have used the second form mostly in the case of two З's in row: ЗꙀ (the system in use till mid-18th century).

The civil (Petrine) script knows only one shape of the letter: З/з. However, shapes similar to Z/z can be used in certain stylish typefaces.

In callygraphy 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).

Phonetic value

The letter Ze may represent:

• /z/, the voiced alveolar sibilant;
• /zʲ/, if followed by ⟨ь⟩ (by ⟨ј⟩ in Serbian) or any of the palatalizing vowels, as in Russian зеркало [ˈzʲɛr.kə.lə] (“mirror”);
• /s/, the voiceless alveolar sibilant (in final position or before voiceless consonants);
• /sʲ/, if followed by ⟨ь⟩ in final position or before voiceless consonants;
• clusters ⟨зж⟩ and ⟨зш⟩ are pronounced in Russian as if they were ⟨жж⟩ and ⟨шш⟩, respecively (even if ⟨з⟩ is the last letter of a preposition, like in Russian без жены “without wife” or из школы “from school”);
• cluster ⟨зч⟩ (sometimes also ⟨здч⟩) is pronounced in Russian as if it was ⟨щ⟩ (рассказчик “narrator”, звёздчатый “stellar, star-shaped”, без чая “without tea”);
• cluster ⟨дз⟩ can be pronounced (mostly in Ukrainian and Belarusian) as the voiced alveolar affricate /dz/ (Ukrainian дзеркало “mirror”) or its palatalized form /dzʲ/ (Belarusian гадзіннік “clock”), but if ⟨д⟩ and ⟨з⟩ belong to different morphemes, then they are pronounced separately.

З-shaped Latin letters

Montenegrin

A proposed version of the Latin alphabet for the Montenegrin language includes a letter of the shape З/з to represent the phoneme /dz/.

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 ⟨j⟩.

Other related letters and similar characters

• 3 : Digit Three
• Ζ ζ : Greek letter Zeta
• Z z : Latin letter Z
• Ʒ ʒ : Latin letter Ezh
• Ȝ ȝ : Latin letter Yogh
• Ҙ ҙ : Cyrillic letter Dhe or Ze with descender
• Ӡ ӡ : Cyrillic letter Abkhazian Dze

Computing codes

External links

• The Wiktionary entry for З
• The Wiktionary entry for з