[Spellyans] Tailed-Z

[Michael Everson]

Please do not start mixing Germany lead-type typography with medieval British manuscripts. They are unrelated. Making something out of such superficial glyphic resemblances is like relating Hungarian and Chinese because their words for 'woman' are "nő" and "nü".

Modern Ezh dates from the 19th century and does not derive from German blackletter. It derives from the Phonotypic alphabet. 

On 25 Apr 2012, at 16:27, Jon Mills wrote:

> I've just come across this description of tailed-z on Wikipedia.
> "Blackletter Z
> A glyph variant of Z originating in the medieval Gothic minuscules and the Early Modern Blackletter typefaces is the "tailed z" (German geschwänztes Z, also Z mit Unterschlinge). In some Antiqua typefaces, this letter is present as a standalone letter or in ligatures. Together with long s (ſ), it is the origin of the ß ligature in the German alphabet.
> Z in an Antiqua typeface may be identical with the character representing 3 in other fonts.
> A graphical variant of tailed Z is Ezh, as adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet as the sign for the voiced postalveolar fricative. Tailed Z is to be distinguished from the similar insular G and yogh found in Old English, Irish, Middle English, etc.
> Unicode assigns codepoints for "BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL Z" and "FRAKTUR SMALL Z" in the Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical alphanumeric symbols ranges, at U+2128 ℨ and U+1D537 𝖟, respectively."

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/