Ze (Cyrillic)

History and shape

Ze is derived from the Greek letter Zeta (Ζ 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 зеркало ("mirror");
• , 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 без жены "without wife" or из школы "from school");
• cluster (sometimes also ) is pronounced in Russian as if it was (рассказчик "narrator", звёздчатый "stellar, star-shaped", без чая "without tea");
• cluster can be pronounced (mostly in Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian) as the voiced alveolar affricate (Ukrainian дзеркало "mirror") or its palatalized form (Belarusian гадзіннік "clock"), 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 z.

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
• Ɜ ɜ : Latin letter reversed open E
• Ҙ ҙ : Cyrillic letter Dhe or Ze with descender
• Ӡ ӡ : Cyrillic letter Abkhazian Dze
• Ԑ ԑ : Cyrillic letter Reversed Ze

Encodings

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

|0417|name1=Cyrillic Capital Letter Ze |0437|name2=Cyrillic Small Letter Ze |A640|name3=Cyrillic Capital Letter Zemlya |A641|name4=Cyrillic Small Letter Zemlya

References

References

1. Ponomar Project. ''The Complete Character Range for Slavonic Script in Unicode.''