Že or Zhe (ژ), used to represent the phoneme /ʒ/ , is a letter in the Persian alphabet, based on zayn (ز) with two additional diacritic dots. It is one of the five letters that the Persian alphabet adds to the original Arabic script, others being چ ,پ and گ, in addition the obsolete ڤ.[1] In name and shape, it is a variant of ze. Its numerical value is 4000 (see Abjad numerals).

Zhe
Persian
ژ
Phonemic representationʒ
Position in alphabet31
Numerical value4000
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician

It is found with this value in other Arabic-derived scripts. It is used in Pashto, Kurdish, other Iranian languages, Uyghur, Ottoman Turkish (j in the modern Turkish alphabet), Azerbaijani and Urdu, but not in Arabic.

In Kashmiri, this letter is called "tse" and represents the phoneme [t͡s].

In most of the Levant and Northwestern Africa, the letter ج ǧīm is used for /ʒ/. In Moroccan Arabic, the letter ژ is sometimes used to represent emphatic Z, such as in the word بژ meaning "children", as opposed to the normal ز, in order to differentiate between words that would look similar (for example بز meaning "forcing, to force").[2]


Position in word Isolated Final Medial Initial
Glyph form:
(Help)
ژ ـژ ـژ ژ

When representing this sound in transliteration of Persian into Hebrew, it is written as ז׳.

Character encodings

edit
Character information
Preview ژ
Unicode name PERSIAN LETTER JEH
Encodings decimal hex
Unicode 1688 U 0698
UTF-8 218 152 DA 98
Numeric character reference ژ ژ

In other scripts

edit

Devanagari

edit

In Devanagari the letters झ़ and श़ (with a nuqta) are used to represent the sound of /ʒ/, e.g. टेलीविझ़न / टेलीविश़न ṭēlivižan 'television'. The letter corresponds to the Urdu Perso-Arabic ژ.

Bengali

edit

In Bengali the sound of /ʒ/ may be represented as জ়়, i.e. the letter Ja with two dots.

Cyrillic

edit

The letter ж, common in some Slavic languages, has an equivalent sound to the "s" in "television" e.g. Zharkov (Russian Cyrillic: Жарков).

See also

edit

References

edit
  1. ^ Orsatti, Paola (2019). "Persian Language in Arabic Script: The Formation of the Orthographic Standard and the Different Graphic Traditions of Iran in the First Centuries of the Islamic Era". Creating Standards (Book).
  2. ^ المدلاوي المنبهي, محمد (2019). العربية الدارجة (in Moroccan Arabic). Center for Development of Darija, Zagoura مركز تنمية الدارجة زاڭورة. p. 63. ISBN 9789920381970.