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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I’ll briefly cover (1) a bit of the history of English and where we first got our letterform for /zh/, (2) where the odd mix of English spelling comes from, and (3) the early attempts at spelling reform, some more successful than others at shaping modern spelling — including one that I just found that *does use zh*! And you won’t *believe* who wrote it! Stay tuned!
*Note*: I’m going to link to WP articles for individual terms, but a good overview on the whole subject is at [Rice U. 2009](https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html) for further reading. Also [History Today on spelling reform](https://www.historytoday.com/brief-history-english-spelling-reform).
English “began” as Old English/Anglo-Saxon and was written in [Elder Futhark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark), i.e. runes. They were already losing popularity when William the Conquerer… conquered, and that sealed their fate. Official documents would be written in Norman French for several centuries, but there were writings in English now using the Latin alphabet, but with pairs of letters to stand in for missing sounds in the old runes. What’s relevant here is that while /sh/ and others got digraphs (pairs of letters), the /zh/ sound, and also /dzh/ and /y/, were being substituted with the runic holdover letter [yogh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh). No digraph.
The rest of the story of English you might have heard a bit already — French trickles down to the common folk to messily merge and become Middle English, the spelling there remains basically a free-for-all, then a [Great Vowel Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) into Early Modern English, and mixed in there is printing and a big rush to standardize all the jumbled spellings everywhere. Enter the grammarians.
There’s people publishing standardizations and fixes for English spelling and grammar throughout history (and for other languages), but it really takes off in the 17th and 18th centuries in line with the prescriptivist dictionary craze. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster are some of the big names to come out of this time — the former eventually abandoned top-down reform, but the latter of course introduced the abominations of American English that we see in Microsoft Word spell check like “Coliseum”. Some reformers were radical, however, and many in particular put forth new fancy letter forms to replace English digraphs. One prolific philosopher with such a proposal was none other than Ben Franklin. His (utterly illegible) reform introduced six new letterforms for some extra vowels and consonants. The older Standard American English has 40 phonemes, so in the end he still had to resort to digraphs, including, for /zh/, “zh” (well, almost). ([Franklin 1779 p. 469](https://archive.org/details/politicalmiscell00franrich/page/468/mode/2up) shows it directly; you can also see [Smithsonian Mag 2013](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/benjamin-franklins-phonetic-alphabet-58078802/?no-ist) article on Franklin’s reform.)
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