Ẓāʾ
| Semitic alphabets |
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| Phoenician (c.1050 – 200 BCE) |
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| Hebrew (400 BCE – present) |
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History · Transliteration |
| Syriac (200 BCE – present) |
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| Arabic (400 CE – present) |
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History · Transliteration |
Ẓāʾ ظ is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being thāʼ, khāʼ, dhāl, ḍād, ġayn). In Arabic it represents a pharyngealized voiced alveolar fricative, voiced dental fricative or velarized voiced dental fricative ([zˤ]~[ðˤ]~[ðˠ]). In name and shape, it is a variant of ṭāʼ. Its numerical value is 900 (see Abjad numerals).
The ẓāʼ sound is an emphatic [z] or [ð], pronounced with the center of the tongue depressed. Regional pronunciations vary; it may sound like an emphatic counterpart of either ز or ذ. In few dialects, such as the Lebanese Arabic, it is indistinguishable from the former in sound.[citation needed] Because the Persian pronunciation of this letter is influenced by the Levantine dialect, it too, is indistinguishable in sound.[citation needed]
Ẓāʼ is the rarest phoneme of the Arabic language. Out of 2,967 triliteral roots listed by Hans Wehr in his 1952 dictionary, only 42 (1.4%) contain ظ.
In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, ṱ ([θˤ] or [ðˤ]), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic ẓāʼ, while it merged with ṣ in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for ẓ. See also ḍād.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ט׳.
| Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph form: | ظ | ـظ | ـظـ | ظـ |
Character encodings[edit]
| Character | ظ | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | ARABIC LETTER ZAH | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 1592 | U+0638 |
| UTF-8 | 216 184 | D8 B8 |
| Numeric character reference | ظ | ظ |
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- Hans Wehr, Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952)
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