Ze (Cyrillic)
Encyclopedia
Ze is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
.
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 typewriter
s even had no individual key for the digit 3 assuming to use uppercase letter З instead) and the Cyrillic letter E
⟨Э⟩.
(Ζ ζ).
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet
its name was (zemlja), meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked like a Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom (majuscule: , minuscule: ).
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 /. 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 / 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: (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).
includes a letter of the shape З/з to represent the phoneme /dz/.
. In 1986, it was replaced by ⟨j⟩.
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
.
It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative
Voiced alveolar fricative
The voiced alveolar fricatives are consonantal sounds. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents these sounds depends on whether a sibilant or non-sibilant fricative is being described....
/z/, like the pronunciation of ⟨z⟩ in "zoo".
Ze is romanized using the Latin letter ⟨z⟩.
The shape of Ze is very similar
Homoglyph
In typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more characters, or glyphs, with shapes that either appear identical or cannot be differentiated by quick visual inspection. This designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties....
to the Arabic numeral three ⟨3⟩ (many cheap models of Cyrillic typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
s even had no individual key for the digit 3 assuming to use uppercase letter З instead) and the Cyrillic letter E
E (Cyrillic)
E , also known as Backwards E from , E oborotnoye, is a letter found amongst Slavonic languages only in Russian and Belarusian, representing the sounds and...
⟨Э⟩.
History and shape
Ze is derived from the Greek letter ZetaZeta (letter)
Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Zayin...
(Ζ ζ).
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet
Early Cyrillic alphabet
The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...
its name was (zemlja), meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked like a Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom (majuscule: , minuscule: ).
In the Cyrillic numeral system
Cyrillic numerals
The Cyrillic numerals are a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic script, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals....
, 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 /. Some early grammars tried to give a phonetical distinction to these forms (like palatalized vs. nonpalatalized sound), the system had no further development. Ukrainian
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
scribes and typographers were regularly using З/з in an initial position, and / otherwise (a system in use till the end of the 19th century). Typographers from the Great Russia
Great Russia
Great Russia is an obsolete name formerly applied to the territories of "Russia proper", the land that formed the core of Muscovy and, later, Russia...
also knew the two shapes, but have used the second form mostly in the case of two З's in row: (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:, the voiced alveolar sibilant;, if followed by ⟨ь⟩ (by ⟨ј⟩ in Serbian) or any of the palatalizing vowels, as in Russian зеркало [ˈzʲɛr.kə.lə] (“mirror”);, the voiceless alveolar sibilant (in final position or before voiceless consonants);, 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 affricateVoiced alveolar affricateThe voiced alveolar affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨⟩ or ⟨⟩ , and the equivalent X-SAMPA representation is ⟨dz⟩.-Features:...
/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.
Montenegrin
A proposed version of the Latin alphabet for the Montenegrin languageMontenegrin language
Montenegrin is a name used for the Serbo-Croatian language as spoken by Montenegrins; it also refers to an incipient standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian used as the official language of Montenegro...
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) toneTone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
. 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 ZZZ is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal...
: Latin letter Ezh : Latin letter Yogh : Cyrillic letter Dhe or Ze with descender : Cyrillic letter Abkhazian Dze
Computing codes
| character | З | з | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZE | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ZE | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1047 | 0417 | 1079 | 0437 |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
208 151 | D0 97 | 208 183 | D0 B7 |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
З | З | з | з |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
250 | FA | 218 | DA |
| Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:... |
244 | F4 | 243 | F3 |
| Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87... |
135 | 87 | 167 | A7 |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
199 | C7 | 231 | E7 |
| ISO-8859-5 | 183 | B7 | 215 | D7 |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 135 | 87 | 231 | E7 |