, or (), is the seventeenth letter of the

Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicase, unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most ...

, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions fo ...

(the others being , , , , ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . Its numerical value is 900 (see

Abjad numerals The Abjad numerals, also called Hisab al-Jummal (, ), are a decimal alphabetic numeral system/alphanumeric code, in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been used in the Arab world, Arabic-speaking ...

). It is related to the

Ancient North Arabian Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Ara ...

𐪜‎‎, and South Arabian . ' does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:

Frequency

is the rarest phoneme of the Arabic language. Out of 2,967 triliteral roots listed by

Hans Wehr Hans Bodo Wehr (; 5 July 190924 May 1981) was a German Arabist. He is best known for his work on '' A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic'', originally published in German as in 1952. The system of transliteration used in the dictionary has beco ...

in his 1952 dictionary, only 42 (1.4%) contain . is the least mentioned letter in the

Quran The Quran, also Romanization, romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a Waḥy, revelation directly from God in Islam, God (''Allah, Allāh''). It is organized in 114 chapters (, ) which ...

(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 Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the linguistic homeland for Proto-Semitic: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, ...

phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, / ( or ), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic , while it merged with in most other

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya language, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew language, Hebrew, Maltese language, Maltese, Modern South Arabian language ...

, although the

South Arabian alphabet The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: ; modern ) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only con ...

retained a symbol for .

Pronunciation

Classical Arabic Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...

, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative , and in

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of Standard language, standardized, Literary language, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages al ...

, it represents an

pharyngealized Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound. IPA symbols In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pharyngealization can be indicate ...

voiced dental but can also be a alveolar fricative for a number of speakers. In most Arabic vernaculars and ''

ḍād () is the fifteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . Its numerical value is 800 (see Abjad numerals ...

'' merged quite early. The outcome depends on the dialect. In those varieties (such as

Egyptian ''Egyptian'' describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of year ...

and Levantine), where the

dental fricative The dental fricative or interdental fricative is a fricative consonant pronounced with the tip of the tongue pressing under the teeth. There are several types (those used in English being written as ''th''): *Voiced dental fricative - as in the ...

s and are merged with the

dental stop In phonetics and phonology, a dental stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with the tongue in contact with the upper teeth (hence dental), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a stop consonant). Dental and alveolar stops are ...

s and , ''ẓādʾ'' is pronounced or depending on the word; e.g. is pronounced but is pronounced , In loanwords from Classical Arabic is often , e.g. Egyptian ''ʿaẓīm'' (< Classical ''ʿaḏ̣īm'') "great". In the varieties (such as

Bedouin The Bedouin, Beduin, or Bedu ( ; , singular ) are pastorally nomadic Arab tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia (Iraq). The Bedouin originated in the Sy ...

, Tunisian, and Iraqi), where the dental fricatives are preserved, both and are pronounced . However, there are dialects in South Arabia and in

Mauritania Mauritania, officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, is a sovereign country in Maghreb, Northwest Africa. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Western Sahara to Mauritania–Western Sahara border, the north and northwest, ...

where both the letters are kept different but not consistently. A "de-emphaticized" pronunciation of both letters in the form of the plain entered into other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Turkish. However, there do exist Arabic borrowings into

Ibero-Romance languages The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languages Iberian languages is also used as a more inclusive term for all languages spoken on the Iberian Peninsula, which in antiquity included the non-Indo-European Iberian language. are a ...

as well as Hausa and Malay, where and are differentiated. In English, the sound is sometimes represented by the digraph ''zh''. Notes: # In Mauritania (

Hassaniya Arabic Hassaniya Arabic (; also known as , , , , and Maure) is a variety of Maghrebi Arabic spoken by Mauritanian Arabs, Malian Arabs and the Sahrawis. It was spoken by the Beni Ḥassān Bedouin tribes of Yemeni origin who extended their authority o ...

), is mostly pronounced as in ('to laugh'), from , but generally appears in the lexemes borrowed from Standard Arabic as in ('weak'), from * .Catherine Taine-Cheikh. 2020. Ḥassāniyya Arabic. In Christopher Lucas & Stefano Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced change, 245–263. Berlin: Language Sci- ence Press. # In Egypt, Lebanon, etc, is mostly pronounced in inherited words as in ('darkness'), from ; ('bone'), from , but pronounced in borrowings from Literary Arabic as in ('injustice'); from . # In some accents in Egypt, the emphatic is pronounced as a plain .

Character encodings

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zad Arabic letters Urdu letters

Frequency

Pronunciation

Character encodings

See also

References