Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
Ẓāʾ
Letter of the Arabic alphabet From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
Ẓāʾ, or ḏ̣āʾ (ظ), is the seventeenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ṯāʾ, ḫāʾ, ḏāl, ḍād, ġayn). In name and shape, it is a variant of ṭāʾ. Its numerical value is 900 (see Abjad numerals). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪜, and South Arabian 𐩼.
Ẓāʾ ظَاءْ does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:
Remove ads
Frequency
Ẓāʾ 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.[1] Ẓāʾ is the least mentioned letter in the Quran (not including the eight special letters in Arabic), and is only mentioned 853 times in the Quran.
In relation to other Semitic languages
In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, ṯ̣/ḏ̣ ([θˤ] or [ðˤ]), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic ẓādʾ, while it merged with ṣ in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for ẓ.
Remove ads
Pronunciation
Summarize
Perspective
In Classical Arabic, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative [ðˠ], and in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents an pharyngealized voiced dental [ðˤ] but can also be a alveolar [zˤ] fricative for a number of speakers.
In most Arabic vernaculars ظ ẓāʾ and ض ḍād merged quite early.[2] The outcome depends on the dialect. In those varieties (such as Egyptian and Levantine), where the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ are merged with the dental stops /t/ and /d/, ẓādʾ is pronounced /dˤ/ or /zˤ/ depending on the word; e.g. ظِل is pronounced /dˤɪl/ but ظاهِر is pronounced /zˤaːhɪr/, In loanwords from Classical Arabic ẓāʾ is often /zˤ/, e.g. Egyptian ʿaẓīm (< Classical عظيم ʿaḏ̣īm) "great".[2][3][4]
In the varieties (such as Bedouin, Tunisian, and Iraqi), where the dental fricatives are preserved, both ḍād and ẓāʾ are pronounced /ðˤ/.[2][3][5][6] However, there are dialects in South Arabia and in Mauritania where both the letters are kept different but not consistently.[2]
A "de-emphaticized" pronunciation of both letters in the form of the plain /z/ entered into other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Turkish.[2] However, there do exist Arabic borrowings into Ibero-Romance languages as well as Hausa and Malay, where ḍād and ẓāʾ are differentiated.[2]
In English, the sound is sometimes represented by the digraph zh.
Notes:
- In Mauritania (Hassaniya Arabic), ض is mostly pronounced /ðˤ/ as in /ðˤħak/ ('to laugh'), from */dˤaħika/ ضحك, but /dˤ/ generally appears in the lexemes borrowed from Standard Arabic as in /dˤʕiːf/ ('weak'), from */dˤaʕiːf/ ضعيف.[7]
- In Egypt, Lebanon, etc, ظ is mostly pronounced /dˤ/ in inherited words as in /dˤalma/ ('darkness'), from */ðˤulma/ ظلمة; /ʕadˤm/ ('bone'), from عظم /ʕaðˤm/, but pronounced /zˤ/ in borrowings from Literary Arabic as in /zˤulm/ ('injustice'); from */ðˤulm/ ظلم.
- In some accents in Egypt, the emphatic /dˤ/ is pronounced as a plain /d/.
Remove ads
Character encodings
See also
References
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads