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
It’s all about where that sound comes from, historically. As many comments have pointed out, almost all instances of /ʒ/ (or “zh” as you write it) are written with an S. That’s no coincidence. Have you ever thought it was weird that “s-i-o-n” and “t-i-o-n” are pronounced “zhun” and “shun”? That’s certainly not what the letters would appear to be saying. You might expect those to sound like “syun” or “tyun” (assuming you’re comfortable with turning unstressed consonants into /ə/ – the vowel in “dumb”, which is super common in English).
And actually, they WERE said like “syun” and “tyun”, but as it turns out, English speakers really hate that Y sound in the middle of their words. So they take the /j/ (the first sound in “yellow”. I know, using a j is confusing but these symbols are international) sound and basically combine it into the preceding consonant. We can see that in tons of examples:
– Statue: Statyu? More like Stachu.
– Mission: Misyun? More like Mishun.
– Leisure: Leezyur? More like Leezhur.
– Vision: Vizyin? More like Vizhun.
– YouTube: Yootoob? More like Yoochoob.
“But wait!” You might be thinking. “That last one isn’t right! I say ‘Yootoob’ like it’s written!” If so, congrats, you’re probably American. But much of Britain now says “Yoochoob”, which is just the next in a long line of slow morphs in the English language. Because in ~~the British accent~~ (can’t believe I actually wrote that, I should know better) *certain British accents*, it would typically be “Yootyoob”, and there’s that pesky middle Y again that we hate so much. The fact is, pronunciation changes a lot faster than spelling, especially in a world as modernized as this one.
There’s a really nice video on the topic from Dr. Geoff Lindsay [here](https://youtu.be/RRs103ETh2Q). I’m always happy to recommend his videos for linguistic questions, dude is a genius. He covers the “ch” case, rather than the “zh” case, but it’s got virtually identical reasoning.
Oh, and PS: as another commenter mentioned, “zh” is most common in transcribing Chinese languages, it’s fairly modern. China uses that sound in places that couldn’t possibly have combined with the /j/ sound, like “Zhang”. I challenge you to find an English word without Chinese origins that has the “zha” *(to clarify, I’d be interested in specifically /ʒæ/, like the middle of the phrase “beige axe”. Several people have already given examples of /ʒʌ/ and /ʒa/)* sound in it (and no cheating, the “dzha” in words like “jab” doesn’t count). Maybe if English had developed with more Chinese influence, “zh” would be more common.
Update: several people, more knowledgeable about Mandarin pinyin than I, have informed me that the above usage of ZH does not correlate well at all with the English phoneme /ʒ/. Now that’s gotten me curious, whether English speakers just slowly mutated the /ʈʂ/ it represents into /ʒ/ (which feels weird, since it’s much more in line with the English CH sound /tʃ/) or if that association of the letters ZH came from a completely different source and Mandarin has nothing to do with it. Any literary historians or transliterators who know more about this, please share with the class!
The zh sound is not a natural one in English based on the root languages it came from. The ZH sound is closer to the S or Ch sounds.
People from other languages would hear a different sound base due to the fact they produce the sound combo using a mouth placement that is more natural in the native speech. This is the core of where a person’s accent comes from.
Another factor is, the printing press which set most of our letters in place came English just as we were going through a prononcation shift. So words would be spent differently than they sound and stayed that way longer than before due to written books being cheaper and around more.
Add in the 1700 and 1800 state of standardization which saw words being written not as they sound… but based on the language the root for them came from and you grow further and further from the sound in the mouth vs the written word.
The classic is don’t forget that “ye” is prounced “the”. The y in this case isn’t a y but an old letter that stood for the th sound. Over time other letters have slipped out of usage in English. The c for example use to sound more like the k sound but now lives in a soft s sound.
Bottom line is… English is not a phonetic language. It’s a construct language only. Which is why teaching it phonetically can be one of the dumbest ways to learn.
Because you can easily replace that sound with a more common combination of letters, e.g. “measure“
The zh sound is not a natural one in English based on the root languages it came from. The ZH sound is closer to the S or Ch sounds.
People from other languages would hear a different sound base due to the fact they produce the sound combo using a mouth placement that is more natural in the native speech. This is the core of where a person’s accent comes from.
Another factor is, the printing press which set most of our letters in place came English just as we were going through a prononcation shift. So words would be spent differently than they sound and stayed that way longer than before due to written books being cheaper and around more.
Add in the 1700 and 1800 state of standardization which saw words being written not as they sound… but based on the language the root for them came from and you grow further and further from the sound in the mouth vs the written word.
The classic is don’t forget that “ye” is prounced “the”. The y in this case isn’t a y but an old letter that stood for the th sound. Over time other letters have slipped out of usage in English. The c for example use to sound more like the k sound but now lives in a soft s sound.
Bottom line is… English is not a phonetic language. It’s a construct language only. Which is why teaching it phonetically can be one of the dumbest ways to learn.
I’ve seen “ZH” used a lot for an “L” sound. Anyone know what’s up with that?
It’s all about where that sound comes from, historically. As many comments have pointed out, almost all instances of /ʒ/ (or “zh” as you write it) are written with an S. That’s no coincidence. Have you ever thought it was weird that “s-i-o-n” and “t-i-o-n” are pronounced “zhun” and “shun”? That’s certainly not what the letters would appear to be saying. You might expect those to sound like “syun” or “tyun” (assuming you’re comfortable with turning unstressed consonants into /ə/ – the vowel in “dumb”, which is super common in English).
And actually, they WERE said like “syun” and “tyun”, but as it turns out, English speakers really hate that Y sound in the middle of their words. So they take the /j/ (the first sound in “yellow”. I know, using a j is confusing but these symbols are international) sound and basically combine it into the preceding consonant. We can see that in tons of examples:
– Statue: Statyu? More like Stachu.
– Mission: Misyun? More like Mishun.
– Leisure: Leezyur? More like Leezhur.
– Vision: Vizyin? More like Vizhun.
– YouTube: Yootoob? More like Yoochoob.
“But wait!” You might be thinking. “That last one isn’t right! I say ‘Yootoob’ like it’s written!” If so, congrats, you’re probably American. But much of Britain now says “Yoochoob”, which is just the next in a long line of slow morphs in the English language. Because in ~~the British accent~~ (can’t believe I actually wrote that, I should know better) *certain British accents*, it would typically be “Yootyoob”, and there’s that pesky middle Y again that we hate so much. The fact is, pronunciation changes a lot faster than spelling, especially in a world as modernized as this one.
There’s a really nice video on the topic from Dr. Geoff Lindsay [here](https://youtu.be/RRs103ETh2Q). I’m always happy to recommend his videos for linguistic questions, dude is a genius. He covers the “ch” case, rather than the “zh” case, but it’s got virtually identical reasoning.
Oh, and PS: as another commenter mentioned, “zh” is most common in transcribing Chinese languages, it’s fairly modern. China uses that sound in places that couldn’t possibly have combined with the /j/ sound, like “Zhang”. I challenge you to find an English word without Chinese origins that has the “zha” *(to clarify, I’d be interested in specifically /ʒæ/, like the middle of the phrase “beige axe”. Several people have already given examples of /ʒʌ/ and /ʒa/)* sound in it (and no cheating, the “dzha” in words like “jab” doesn’t count). Maybe if English had developed with more Chinese influence, “zh” would be more common.
Update: several people, more knowledgeable about Mandarin pinyin than I, have informed me that the above usage of ZH does not correlate well at all with the English phoneme /ʒ/. Now that’s gotten me curious, whether English speakers just slowly mutated the /ʈʂ/ it represents into /ʒ/ (which feels weird, since it’s much more in line with the English CH sound /tʃ/) or if that association of the letters ZH came from a completely different source and Mandarin has nothing to do with it. Any literary historians or transliterators who know more about this, please share with the class!
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.)
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.)
I’ve seen “ZH” used a lot for an “L” sound. Anyone know what’s up with that?
I’ve seen “ZH” used a lot for an “L” sound. Anyone know what’s up with that?
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