Saturday, November 10, 2007

Ž
Ž (minuscule: ž) is: the 25th letter of the Slovenian alphabet, the 30th letter of the Serbian; the 42nd letter of the Czech; the 19th letter of the Estonian; the 33rd letter of the Latvian; the 32nd letter of the Lithuanian; the 46th letter of Slovak; the 13th letter of the Turkmen alphabet and the 29th letter of the Sami alphabet. In addition, the character is also used as a transliteration of Cyrillic "Ж" in Macedonian (in 31st position) and in Finnish and occasionally in Bulgarian (with no special running order of Roman characters). It denotes a similar phoneme to the Portuguese and French J. Apart from Estonian and Turkmen, this is the final letter of the other alphabets. In English it is pronounced like the g in genre.
It is formed by addition of a caron to the standard Z letter used in most alphabets based on Latin script and it is pronounced (IPA) /ʒ/ in all named alphabets except for Turkmen alphabet, where it is pronounced (IPA) /ʤ/. Like its Latin counterpart, the Cyrillic alphabet has a specific symbol: Ж.

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