pronunciation - "zh" vs. "j". Are these pronounced in the same way?


I've seen some Chinese words like "YUEZHONG". Also in some other languages like Persian and Arabic I've seen words written with "zh". Are these two sounds pronounced in the same way? Is there any word in English using the same combination of letters? Is it right to use "zh" to imply the letter "j"?



Answer



Short answer: "zh" and "j" are not pronounced in the same way.


Using the International Phonetic Alphabet, the "zh" digraph would be transcribed as [ʒ], while the "j" letter would be [dʒ]. The "zh" sound occurs at the beginning of the name "Jacques" [ʒɔk], and in the middle of the word "leisure" [liʒɚ]. The "j" sound is two IPA symbols because it is a combination of two sounds, [d] (as in "dog") and [ʒ]; [dʒ] occurs at the beginning of the word "jock" [dʒɔk].


The "zh" and "j" sounds are definitely not identical to an English speaker. In fact, two words could be distinguished only by the difference between those two sounds. The following would represent such a minimal pair:



  • "legion" [lidʒən] (where the "gi" sound is identical to "j")

  • "lesion" [liʒən]


("Jock" and "Jacques", which I already mentioned, also only differ in that one sound.)


The reason you see many borrowed words using "zh" is because English lacks a standard letter to represent the [ʒ] sound. In French borrowings, it is "j", because "j" is always [ʒ] in French. Sometimes it is "si" (as in "lesion") because of a natural phonological process that occurs in English. So, there is no letter that always gets pronounced [ʒ]. But, in many languages that don't use Latin script, there is a distinct letter for [ʒ]. In these languages, "zh" is often the standard way to translate the sound [ʒ] from their orthographical system to the Latin one in an unambiguous way.


As to whether you can use "zh" to imply "j" — I am not certain what you mean by "imply", but since these are two different sounds, I think the answer is probably no.


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