Ezh (capital Ʒ, lowercase ʒ) is a character in the IPA. Also called the tailed z, it represents a voiced postalveolar fricative (SAMPA: [Z]), appearing in e.g. vision: [ˈvɪʒən] (SAMPA: ["vIZ@n]) IPA symbols, detail from Image:Ipa-chart-consonants-pulmonic. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet used by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) the human vocal apparatus can produce. ... Postalveolar (or palato-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge (the place of articulation for alveolar consonants) and the palate (the place of articulation for palatal consonants). ... Fricative consonants are produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together (e. ... The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). ...

As a phonetic symbol, ezh originates with Isaac Pitman's alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. Medieval cursive forms of Latin z, evolving into the blackletter z letter, are very similar in appearance. For purposes of electronic text encoding, however, the latter is considered a glyph variant of z, and not an ezh. Categories: Stub ... Z is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the English alphabet. ... Fig. ...

Ezh is used as a letter in some orthographies of the Sami languages, both by itself, and with a hacek ( Ǯ ǯ). It also appears in the orthography of some African languages, e.g. the Aja language of Benin and the Daghbani language of Ghana, where the uppercase variant looks like a reflected Σ. Sami is a general name for a group of Finno-Ugric languages spoken in parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, in Northern Europe. ... Caron redirects here, for the French actress, see Leslie Caron. ... Aja is a Nilo-Saharan language of the Central Sudanic subgroup, spoken in the southern Sudanese province of Bahr el Ghazal and along the Sudanese border in the Central African Republic. ... Sigma may refer to many things: Sigma (upper case Σ, lower case σ, alternative ς) is a letter in the Greek alphabet. ...

Ezh and Yogh

In Unicode 1.0 the character was mistakenly unified with the unrelated character Yogh (Ȝ ȝ), which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Genetically, ezh is derived from Latin z, while Yogh is derived from Latin g. The characters do look very similar, and do not appear alongside each other in any alphabet. To better differentiate between ezh and yogh, the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society extend the uppermost tip of the 'yogh' into a little curvature upward. In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... Yogh (Ȝ ȝ) is a letter used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y (IPA /j/) and various velar phonemes. ... Z is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the English alphabet. ... G is the seventh letter in the Roman alphabet. ... Oxford University Press (OUP) is a highly-respected publishing house and a department of the University of Oxford in England. ...

External links

• On the derivation of Yogh and Ezh (http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/ezhyogh.html)