Hindi: झ़

MonsieurGonzalito

MonsieurGonzalito

Senior Member
Castellano de Argentina
Friends,

Does the letter झ़
झ़ - विकिपीडिया
have any entity at all in Hindi?
It is supposed to represent the phoneme /ʒ/ in words like "television", and be the Devanagari counterpart of Urdu's "Persian Zhe" (ژَ) in a handful of words like Zhaala(h) = "dew, sleet" or aZhadaa = "pthon, dragon", (and maybe one or two more meaning "the eyelids", I believe).
But I always see it in Devanagari replaced by ज ज़ when spelling foreign words (incidentally, never by the झ it is supposed to resemble).

Recently, an educated Hindi speaker even plainly told me that "that letter doesn't exist".
 
    • MonsieurGonzalito said:
    Friends,

    Recently, an educated Hindi speaker even plainly told me that "that letter doesn't exist".
    Click to expand...
    S/he is most likely to be right. I can only envisage it being used to convey the ژ sound as in television when teaching Urdu, Persian or English through the medium of Devanagari alphabet.

    The word you have in mind is aZhdahaa.

    (Eyelashes would be miZhgaaN)
     
    Qureshpor said:
    S/he is most likely to be right. I can only envisage it being used to convey the ژ sound as in television when teaching Urdu, Persian or English through the medium of Devanagari alphabet.

    The word you have in mind is aZhdahaa.

    (Eyelashes would be miZhgaaN)
    Click to expand...
    :thank you:
     
    zh.png
     
    Note (ii) is not correct but I shall expand on it in another thread.
     
    MonsieurGonzalito said:
    Friends,

    Does the letter झ़
    झ़ - विकिपीडिया
    have any entity at all in Hindi?
    It is supposed to represent the phoneme /ʒ/ in words like "television", and be the Devanagari counterpart of Urdu's "Persian Zhe" (ژَ) in a handful of words like Zhaala(h) = "dew, sleet" or aZhadaa = "pthon, dragon", (and maybe one or two more meaning "the eyelids", I believe).
    But I always see it in Devanagari replaced by ज ज़ when spelling foreign words (incidentally, never by the झ it is supposed to resemble).

    Recently, an educated Hindi speaker even plainly told me that "that letter doesn't exist".
    Click to expand...
    Perhaps you could ask the moderators to merge your thread and this one as the topic is the same for both.

    Devanagari script: additional signs (see especially #5)
     
    littlepond said:
    In Hindi, the usual pronunciation for the words in note (ii) is "purjaa" and "ajda(a)haa."
    Click to expand...

    How would people typically pronounce a word like “treasure” or “vision” (when speaking Hindi, not English)?

    Trejar?
    Trezar?
    TreZhar?

    Maybe it’s a moot question actually - depends on whether any “Zh” words from English are commonly used in Hindi (even by those that don’t speak English well).
     
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