Z with swash tail
Appearance
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Latin_letter_Z_with_swash_tail.svg/220px-Latin_letter_Z_with_swash_tail.svg.png)
Ɀ (lowercase: ɀ) is a Latin letter z with a "swash tail" (encoded by Unicode, at codepoints U+2C7F for uppercase and U+0240 for lowercase) was used as a phonetic symbol by linguists studying African languages to represent a voiced labio-alveolar fricative ([zʷ]).[1][2]
In 1931, it was adopted into the orthography of Shona for a 'whistled' z, but it was dropped in 1955 due to the lack of the character on typewriters and fonts. Today the digraph zv is used.
It is sometimes used to transcribe Toda's /d̪z̪/.
Notes and references
[edit]- ^ Proposal to add two Africanist phonetic characters to the UCS, Michael Everson & Peter Constable, June 12, 2004.
- ^ Proposal to encode two phonetic characters and two Shona characters, Lorna A. Priest, October 2, 2007.