Zhe (Cyrillic): Difference between revisions

'''Zhe''', '''Zha''', or '''Zhu''', sometimes transliterated as '''Že''' (Ж&nbsp;ж; italics: <span style="font-family: times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: larger">''Ж''&nbsp;''ж''</span>) is a letter of the [[Cyrillic script]]. It commonly represents the [[voiced retroflex sibilant]] {{IPA|/ʐ/}} ([[Media:Voiced retroflex sibilant.ogg|listen]]) or [[voiced alveolarpostalveolar fricative]] /ʒ/, like the pronunciation of the {{angbr|s}} in "mea'''s'''ure". It is also often used with D ([[De (Cyrillic)|Д]]) to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter [[J]] with a ДЖ combination. Zhe is [[romanized]] as {{angbr|zh}}, {{angbr|j}} or {{angbr|ž}}.

Zhe may also be derived from the [[Coptic alphabet|Coptic letter {{transliteration|cop|janjia}}]] ⟨Ϫ⟩⟨{{Coptic|Ϫ}}⟩, supported by the phonetic value ({{transliteration|cop|janjia}} represents the sound /[[Voiced postalveolar affricate|d͡ʒ]]/ in Coptic) and shape of the letter, which the Glagolitic counterpart Zhivete {{angbr|Ⰶ}} resembles even more closely. The form of the letter also may be derived from an [[Egyptian hieroglyph]] depicting a drill:

Ж is most often [[transliteration|transliterated]] as the [[Digraph (orthography)|digraph]] {{angbr|zh}} for English-language readers (as in ''[[Doctor Zhivago (novel)|Doctor Zhivago]]'', Доктор Живаго, or [[Georgy Zhukov]], Георгий Жуков). In linguistics and for Central European readers, it is most often transliterated as {{angbr|ž}}, with a [[háček]]. The [[scientific transliteration]] convention comes from [[Czech language|Czech]] spelling and is also used in the Latin alphabets of several other Slavic languages (Slovak, Sorbian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene). Thus, [[Leonid Brezhnev]]'s surname (Леонид Брежнев) could be transliterated as "Brežnev", as it is spelled in a number of Slavic languages. Polish uses its own convention for transliteration of Cyrillic according to which ж is transliterated with the Polish letter ż (which is pronounced {{IPA|/ʐ/}} in Polish). Ж is often transliterated {{angbr|j}} in Mongolian because of its pronunciation as {{IPA-all|mn|t͡ʃ|}}.

*J j : [[J|Latin letter J]] - the same sound in Romanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, French, Portuguese, and PortugueseCatalan