Zhe (Cyrillic)


Zhe, Zha, or Zhu, sometimes transliterated as Že is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant or voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, like the pronunciation of the in "measure". It is also often used with D to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter J with a ДЖ combination. Zhe is romanized as, or.

History

It is not known how the character for Zhe was derived. No similar letter exists in Greek, Latin or any other alphabet of the time, though there is some graphic similarity with its Glagolitic counterpart Zhivete which represents the same sound. However, the origin of Zhivete, like that of most Glagolitic letters, is unclear.
One possibility is that it was formed from the pronunciation of Hebrew letter Zayin combined with the Hebrew letter Shin letter, to eventually form the Modern Hebrew letter of Zhayin , with a geresh on top for distinction.
Zhe may also be derived from the Coptic letter ⟨⟩, supported by the phonetic value and shape of the letter, which the Glagolitic counterpart Zhivete resembles even more closely. The form of the letter also may be derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting a drill:
U29\
Some Ukrainian scholars argue that it represents the shape of a beetle, since Zhe is the first phoneme in the Slavic word , meaning "beetle".
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet the name of Zhe was , meaning "live".
Zhe was not used in the Cyrillic numeral system.

Usage

Zhe is used in the alphabets of all Slavic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet, and of most non-Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The position in the alphabet and the sound represented by the letter vary from language to language.
LanguagePosition in
alphabet		Represented soundRomanization
Belarusian8thvoiced retroflex fricative zh
Bulgarian7thvoiced postalveolar fricative zh
Macedonian8thvoiced postalveolar fricative ž or zh
Russian8thvoiced retroflex fricative zh
Serbian8thvoiced retroflex fricative ž
Ukrainian9thvoiced postalveolar fricative zh
Uzbek 8thvoiced postalveolar affricate or voiced postalveolar fricative j
Mongolian8thvoiceless postalveolar affricate j
Kazakh10thvoiced alveolo-palatal fricative, sometimes voiced postalveolar affricate in speechj
Kyrgyz8thvoiced postalveolar affricate j
Dungan9thvoiced retroflex fricative r
other non-Slavic languagesvoiced postalveolar fricative

Zhe can also be used in Leet speak or faux Cyrillic in place of the letter, or to represent the symbol of the rap duo Kris Kross.

Transliteration

Ж is most often transliterated as the digraph for English-language readers. In linguistics and for Central European readers, it is most often transliterated as, with a háček. The scientific transliteration convention comes from Czech spelling and is also used in the Latin alphabets of several other Slavic languages. Thus, Leonid Brezhnev's surname 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. Ж is often transliterated in Mongolian because of its pronunciation as.

Related letters and other similar characters