D

D (named dee /ˈdiː/) is the fourth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

The Semitic letter Dāleth may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous but still retained (see letter B). The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, Δ.

The minuscule (lower-case) form of 'd' consists of a loop and a tall vertical stroke. It developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of the letter was reduced, resulting in an angled stroke and loop. The angled stroke slowly developed into a vertical stroke.

Use in writing systems

In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨d⟩ generally represents the voiced alveolar or voiced dental plosive /d/. However, in the Vietnamese alphabet, it represents the sound /z/ in northern dialects or /j/ in southern dialects. (See D with stroke and Dz (digraph).) In Fijian it represents a prenasalized stop /nd/. In some languages where voiceless unaspirated stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, ⟨d⟩ represents an unaspirated /t/, while ⟨t⟩ represents an aspirated /tʰ/. Examples of such languages include Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo and the Pinyin transliteration of Mandarin.

Dół

Dół [duu̯] (German: Daulen) is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Iława, within Iława County, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, in northern Poland. It lies approximately 4 kilometres (2 mi) east of Iława and 62 km (39 mi) west of the regional capital Olsztyn.

Before 1945, the area was part of Germany (East Prussia). Following World War II the native German populace was expelled and replaced by Poles.

The village has a population of 90.

References

Coordinates: 53°35′38″N 19°37′3″E / 53.59389°N 19.61750°E / 53.59389; 19.61750

Dž

Dž (titlecase form; all-capitals form DŽ, lowercase dž) is the seventh letter of the Gaj's Latin alphabet for Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced [d͡ʒ]. Dž is a digraph that corresponds to the letter Dzhe (Џ/џ) of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. It is also the tenth letter of the Slovak alphabet. Although several other languages (see below) also use the letter combination DŽ, they treat it as a pair of the letters D and Ž, not as a single distinct letter.

Note that when the letter is the initial of a capitalised word (like Džungla or Džemper, or personal names like Džemal or Džamonja), the ž is not uppercase. Only when the whole word is written in uppercase, is the Ž capitalised.

Treatment as a single letter

In Croatian, when the text is written vertically rather than horizontally (on signs, for instance), dž is written horizontally as a single letter; in particular, dž occupies a single square in crossword puzzles. Also, in cases where words are written with a space between each letter, dž is written together without a space between d and ž. These characteristics are also shared by Lj and Nj. Similarly, when a name beginning with Dž is reduced to initial, the entire letter is initial, not just D. For example, Dženan Ljubović becomes Dž. Lj. and not D. L. This behaviour is not the case in Slovak, where it is split into D/d and Ž/ž.