Z

Basic Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd     Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

Z ( /ˈzɛd/, /ˈziː/, rarely /ˈɪzərd/; named zed, zee, rarely izzard)^[1] is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents 1 Name and pronunciation 2 History 2.1 Blackletter Z 3 Usage 4 Codes for computing 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Name and pronunciation

In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed ( /ˈzɛd/) reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (see below) but in American English, its name is zee ( /ˈziː/), deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form.^[2] Another English dialectal form is izzard ( /ˈɪzərd/), which dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, for which the Latin form would be *idzēta,^[3] perhaps a popular form with a prosthetic vowel. Other Indo-European languages pronounce the letter's name in a similar fashion, such as zet in Dutch, Polish, German, Romanian and Czech, zède in French, zæt in Danish, zett in Norwegian, zäta in Swedish, zeta in Italian and in Spanish, and zê in Portuguese. However, several languages lacking the /z/ phoneme render it as /ts/, e.g. /tsetɑ/ or /tset/ in Finnish. In Chinese (Mandarin) pinyin the name of the letter Z is pronounced [tsɛ], although the English zed and zee have become very common.

History

Proto-Semitic Z	Phoenician zayin	Etruscan Z	Greek Zeta

The name of the Semitic symbol was zayin, possibly meaning "weapon", and was the seventh letter. It represented either z as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero).

The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician symbol I, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it Zeta, a new name made in imitation of Eta (η) and Theta (θ).

In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the letter seems to have represented /dz/; in Attic, from the 4th century BCE onwards, it seems to have been either /zd/ or a /dz/, and in fact there is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, as Elean and Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and unvoiced th (IPA /ð/ and /θ/, respectively). In the common dialect (κοινη) that succeeded the older dialects, ζ became /z/, as it remains in modern Greek.

In Etruscan, Z may have symbolized /ts/; in Latin, /dz/. In early Latin, the sound of /z/ developed into /r/ and the symbol became useless. It was therefore removed from the alphabet around 300 BCE by the Censor, Appius Claudius Caecus, and a new letter, G, was put in its place soon thereafter.

In the 1st century BCE, it was, like Y, introduced again at the end of the Latin alphabet, in order to represent more precisely the value of the Greek zeta — previously transliterated as S at the beginning and ss in the middle of words, eg. sona = ζωνη, "belt"; trapessita = τραπεζιτης, "banker". The letter appeared only in Greek words, and Z is the only letter besides Y that the Romans took directly from the Greek, rather than Etruscan.

In Vulgar Latin, Greek Zeta seems to have represented (IPA /dj/), and later (IPA /dz/); d was for /z/ in words like baptidiare for baptizare "baptize", while conversely Z appears for /d/ in forms like zaconus, zabulus, for diaconus "deacon", diabulus, "devil". Z also is often written for the consonantal I (that is, J, IPA /j/) as in zunior for junior "younger".

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 f[Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."^[4]

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 Unterschlinge) In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Together with long s, it is also the origin of the ß ligature in German orthography.

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 𝖟, respectively.

lowercase cursive z

Variant of z in an Antiqua typeface. The main problem with this is that some fonts also have this character representing the number 3.

Usage

In Italian, Z represents two phonemes, namely /ts/ and /dz/; in German, it stands for /ts/, though it can be pronounced /tz/ or even /z/ in rapid speech; in Castilian Spanish it represents /θ/ (as English th in thing), though in other dialects (Latin American, Andalusian) this sound has merged with /s/.

In Finnish, Z is pronounced /ts/. Officially the sound [z] would appear in certain select loanwords such as azeri, but in practice [z] is heard and pronounced as /s/ in such words. The use of Z to denote /ts/ is discouraged in official language, as in the case of pitsa ("pizza").

In Chinese (Mandarin) pinyin "z" is pronounced [ts] (unaspirated pinyin "c" - "halfway" between beds and bets). In romanised Japanese Z stands for both [z] and [dz] (which are allophones in that language).

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses [z] for the voiced alveolar sibilant. Early English had used (and to an extent, still does use) 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 double forms from the same original, jealous and zealous. Both of these come from a late Latin zelosus, derived from the imported Greek ζηλος. Much the earlier form is jealous; its initial sound is the [dʒ] which in later French is changed to [ʒ]. It is written gelows or iclous by Wycliffe and his contemporaries; the form with I is the ancestor of the modern form. At the end of words this Z was pronounced ts as in the English assets, which comes from a late Latin ad satis through an early French assez "enough". See English plural.

Z is also used in English to represent /ʒ/ in words like azure, seizure. But this sound appears even more frequently as su or si before other vowels as in measure, decision, etc. In all these words /ʒ/ developed from earlier /zj/.

Zzzz is also used in writing to represent the act of sleeping. It is used because human snoring often sounds like the pronunciation of the letter.

Few words in the Basic English vocabulary begin with Z, though it occurs in words beginning with other letters. It is the most rarely used letter in written English^[5]. 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 Spanish and Italian (-ización/-izzazione) and the British from the 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).

Z is used in six of the seven officially recognized digraphs in the Polish language, and is the most frequently used of the consonants in that language.

Z was abolished in Icelandic in 1973. In its place s is used — as in the word íslenska "Icelandic (language)", where formerly the combination of the d of Ísland and the s of -(i)sk was spelled z (somewhat how Polish names ending in d + ski get changed to dzki).

In English transliterated Tamil script, "zh" is used to represent ழ U+0BB4 (ḻ, [ɹ]).

In mathematics, boldface Z or chalkboard bold ℤ U+2124 is used to denote the set of integers.

Codes for computing

In Unicode, the capital Z is codepoint U+005A and the lower case z is U+007A.

The EBCDIC code for capital Z is 233 and for lowercase z is 169.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "Z" and "z" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

• Zed
• Zee
• Zeta
• Ezh
• Zzz
• З, з - Ze (Cyrillic)

References

External links

• James Grout: Appius Claudius Caecus and the Letter Z, part of the Encyclopædia Romana

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Letter Z with diacritics ŹźẐẑŽžŻżẒẓẔẕƵƶȤȥⱫⱬᵶᶎʐʑɀ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646