What ꚅ means
It represented a voiced “zh” sound pronounced with rounded lips. Linguists write that sound as /ʒʷ/.
Peter von Uslar’s Cyrillic alphabet for Abkhaz dates to 1862. A 1912 Abkhaz Gospel is an early specimen showing ꚅ. The alphabet added letters to represent Abkhaz sounds in print. The shape of ꚅ fuses Cyrillic З and Ж; it is not a ligature meant to be split into those letters.
Is ꚅ still used in Abkhaz?
No. Modern Abkhaz writes the sound Жә. That spelling uses two characters in place of the old single letter.
The writing system changed scripts over time: Abkhaz used Latin-based alphabets in 1926–1928 and 1929–1938, Georgian script in 1938–1954, then returned to Cyrillic in 1954. These changes explain why historical Abkhaz can use ꚅ while modern spelling uses Жә.
Historical Abkhaz spelling; not used in ordinary modern Abkhaz.
Use Жә for the modern Abkhaz spelling.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꚅ
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Don't confuse it with
2Жә Modern Abkhaz spelling for the same sound, written with two characters rather than the old single letter.
Жь A different Abkhaz spelling associated with the historical letter Zhe with breve; it is not interchangeable with ꚅ.
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ꚅ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
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How to type or find ꚅ
- Also called
- zhwe · Abkhaz zhwe
- Search it as
- Abkhaz letter · rounded zh · labialized zh · old Abkhaz spelling
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꚅ\A685Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.