Ẓāʼ

Ẓāʼ (ﻅ) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ṯāʼ, ḫāʼ, ḏāl, ḍād, ġayn). It represents a pharyngealized^{[citation needed]} voiced dental fricative or voiced alveolar fricative (IPA: [ðˁ] or /zˁ/). In name and shape, it is a variant of ṭāʼ.

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 Persian it is indistinguishable from the former, occurring only in words of Arabic origin.

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 (IPA: [θˁ] or /ðˁ/), 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. Ẓāʼ is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

See also

• Arabic phonology
• Ẓ

References

• Hans Wehr, Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952)

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