affricate

When the "d" sound and "j" sound merge, you get something called an affricate.

It just occurs to me: does French even have the affricate /d/ natively?

"dj" in French is pronounced as the same affricate you get by combining "d" and "zh".

This particular affricate is the same sound used in English to pronounce just "j".So a French "dj" is like an English "j".

Then Xż is pronounced "in tandem" as an affricate, and Xrz is pronounced as two separate phonemes.

This is a better explanation for the "dj" in Django rather than saying the "j" is an affricate and the "d" is silent.

The letters "j" in English and "dj" in French represent the same sound, what Wikipedia calls the "voiced palato-velolar affricate" [0].

They probably mean voiceless alveolar affricate, similar to "zz" in Italian pizza.

Orthographic <j> in English represents the affricate /d/, which is unambiguously a phoneme in English.

In Sanskrit, in assimilatory contexts, a voiced palatal affricate /dʒ/ + a palatal nasal /ñ/ + some open vowel, leads to this sequence <ja, virama, nya>.

The 'dj' represents the affricate [d͡ʒ] in older Romani orthographies, the 'j' representing the palatalisation of [d] to [d͡ʒ].

While the affricate /d/ is not pronounced as a separate stop+fricative, it can result from the combining of the stop and the fricative and that is presumably what is behind the choice of "dj" as a digraph for representing /d/ in Django.

One important thing about writing 'z' rather than 'ts' is that is makes it more obvious that it's the affricate 'ts' rather 't' followed by 's', which can seem like a subtle difference on the face of it, but it's important for knowing where the syllable break is.

The fricative and affricate sounds in English that are kinda close to these are only /t͡ʃ/, /ʃ/, /s/, /t͡s/, /ʒ/, and /dʒ/.I think these contrasts represent a very underacknowledged difficulty for English speakers learning Mandarin, because we're used to thinking of tones as the only hard thing.

But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative.

The definition for affricate made me feel real stupid again when I didn't understand almost every third word in the Google provided definition:>a phoneme which combines a plosive with an immediately following fricative or spirant sharing the same place of articulation

Word order is identical in many sentences, both use particles or postpositions to mark the function of nouns, both use topics instead of subjects, both allow you to omit the topic if it can be inferred through context, both have a respect hierarchy built into the grammar, both have tons of pronouns and related categories of family words, both have the adversative passive of Chinese, both are agglutinative in the sense that they allow you to add a noun after a verb phrase to form a relative clause that modifies the noun, both have lots of similarly-pronounced Chinese-derived open class words, both have the rare alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates in their sound inventories as is found in Mandarin, both make the /h/ consonant a voiceless palatal fricative before [i] or [j], etc.