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”?
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There have been many good points that have pointed out phonemes shifts in English, making the pronunciation not match the spelling but I would like to put forth as well that associating “zh” with the phoneme you are thinking of is a fairly recent invention. It is not at all uncommon for European skripts to transcribe letters that don’t have a one to one relationship with one of the 26 letters of the latin alphabet differently.
Compare Italian C(I) in _ciabatta_/_cento_ to Polish CZ in _czeski_
Norse SK in _ski_ to German SCH in _schnell_ to English SH in _shoe_ to french CH is champignon
Which digraph is used for which sound is not at all standardized and zh is just not in wide use in European transcriptions of languages.
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