Dze is a letter of the Cyrillic script, used in the Macedonian language to represent the voiced alveolar affricate, like the pronunciation of ⟨ds⟩ in "needs". It is derived from the letter dzelo or zelo of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, and it was used historically for Old Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, Russian, and Romanian. Although fully obsolete everywhere in the Cyrillic world by the 19th century, the letter zelo was revived in 1944 by the designers of the alphabet of the then-codified Macedonian language. As the Macedonian language is central to the Balkan Linguistic Union, the phonetical need for this individual letter is consistent with the phoneme's presence in Greek, and Albanian, both non-Slavic neighbours to the Macedonian language. In the early 21st century, the same letter also appeared in Vojislav Nikčević's proposal for the new alphabet for the modern Montenegrin language. The most common early letterform resembles the Latin letter S, but it is also seen reversed like the Latin letter Reversed S, or with a tail and a tick. Abkhaz has Abkhazian Dze, with an identical function and name but a different shape.
Origin
The letter is descended from dzělo in the Early Cyrillic alphabet, where it had the numerical value 6. The letter Dzělo was itself based on the letter Dzelo in the Glagolitic alphabet. In the Glagolitic alphabet, it was written, and had the numerical value of 8. In Old Church Slavonic it was called "ѕѣло", and in Church Slavonic it is called "ѕѣлѡ". The origin of Glagolitic letter dzelo is unclear, but the Cyrillic Ѕ may have been influenced by the Greek stigma, the medieval form of the archaic letter digamma, which had the same form and numerical value. Thus the visual similarity of the Cyrillic and Latin is largely coincidental.
Development
The initial sound of in Old Church Slavonic was a soft or, which often corresponds in cognates to a sound in modern Russian, as in мъноѕи, по ноѕѣ, and растрьѕати. However, already in the Old Slavic period the difference between and began to be blurred, and in the written Church Slavonic language from the middle of the 17th century was used only formally. The letter's distinguishing features from are
is used in root derived from these seven words beginning with : ѕвѣзда, ѕвѣрь, ѕеліе, ѕлакъ, ѕлый, ѕмій, ѕѣлѡ;
is used in all remaining cases.
has the numerical value of 6, whereas has the numerical value of 7;
In Russian it was known as зѣло or zelo and had the phonetic value of, or. In the initial version of Russian civil script of Tsar Peter I, the was assigned the sound, and the letter was abolished. However, in the second version of the civil script, was restored, and was abolished. Both versions of the alphabet were used until 1735, which is considered the date of the final elimination of in Russian. was used in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet until the alphabet was abolished in favor of a Latin-based alphabet in 1860-62. was also used—albeit rarely—to the middle of the 19th century in the Serbian civil script, whose orthography was closer to Church Slavonic. Vuk Karadžić's Serbian Cyrillic alphabet did not include, instead favoring the digraph to represent. In Ukrainian, the sound is integrated as part of the language's phonology, but it mainly occurs in loanwords rather than in words of native Ukrainian origin. As such, the digraph is used to represent both the phoneme and the separately occurring consonant cluster which Ukrainian phonotactics assimilate as.
Usage
is now only used in the Macedonian alphabet. A commission formed to standardize the Macedonian language and orthography decided to adopt the letter on December 4, 1944, after a vote of 10-1. The letter represents . The corresponding sound is used in all dialects of Macedonian. is also included in Microsoft's Serbian Cyrillickeyboard layout, although it is not used in the Serbian Cyrillic Alphabet. The Serbian keyboard in Ubuntu replaces Ѕ with a second Ж.
