Dze (Pashtun letter)

The letter in isolated form

connected shapes
ـځ	ـځـ	ځـ
from the right	both sides	to the left

Dze ( Pashtun ځې cē ), sometimes also Dzay , Dzim or Zim (ځيم cīm ) is a letter of the extended Arabic alphabet of the Pashtun language . It was derived from the Arabic letter Ḥa (ح) is derived from an attached Hamza symbol and occurs exclusively in the Pashtun script .

Its sound value in Pashtun is usually a voiced alveolar affricate ( IPA : [dz] ). The pronunciation, however, is strongly dependent on the dialect and in the north of the Pashtun language area tends towards a voiced alveolar fricative (IPA: [z] ).

The letter has only been part of the Pashtun alphabet since the spelling reform in Afghanistan in 1936. Until then, both voiced and unvoiced alveolar affricates were represented in Pashtun by the same character, the letter Tse .

Unicode codepoint	U + 0681
Unicode name	Hah with hamza above
HTML	& # 1665;

Individual evidence

↑ Herbert Penzl: Orthography and phoneme in Pashto (Afghan) . In: Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 74, No. 2, 1954, p. 80
^ David Neil MacKenzie: The Development of the Pashto Script . In: B. Comrie (Ed.): Languages and Scripts of Central Asia . Croom Helm, London 1987, p. 138

[1] Herbert Penzl: Orthography and phoneme in Pashto (Afghan) . In: Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 74, No. 2, 1954, p. 80

[2] David Neil MacKenzie: The Development of the Pashto Script . In: B. Comrie (Ed.): Languages and Scripts of Central Asia . Croom Helm, London 1987, p. 138