Why are there almost no words in English containing the letter combination “zh”, despite the fact that that the sound is quite common, e.g. “measure”?

Question

Why are there almost no words in English containing the letter combination “zh”, despite the fact that that the sound is quite common, e.g. “measure”?

In: 2657

Answer 1

There is no standard cross-linguistic connection between letters/letter combinations written in the Latin alphabet and sounds. Look at Irish, with all those vowel combos that are completely unpronounceable if you’re relying on English language conventions. In English, we tend to use different letters to make the sound for which uou use “zh” here as a standard. Most words with “zh” in English are loan words as far as I know.