IZU'CAR, or MATAMO'ROS TZUCAR, it city and district of Puebla, Mexico. The city is 90 mn. s.e. of Mexico, at the base of Popocatepetl; pop. 12,000. It is the center of a rich sugar region. A railroad was commenced in 1875 to connect it with Puebla. It takes its name from the Mexican gen., Manuel Matamoros.
tenth letter in our alphabet, has Eng. the power of dzh; in Pr., of zh; and in Ger. of y. Both the sound and the character have sprung out of the original vowel i. When such a word as /Rita is pronounced rapidly, it naturally slides into Yutius. Time Romans, though they had but one character for both, recognized this distinction between the vowel amid the semi-vowel; and in the case of such words as emus, mains, some writers" doubled the i, and wrote one or both long, as culIns, or cuilus. There is little doubt that the original Roman sound of this semi-vowel was that of Eng. y (youth), still given to it in German. But as this sound has a tendency to con vert the consonant preceding it into a sibilant (see letter C), so it has a tendency to become itself sibilant, and Yu/. slides into Fr. zhul-, Eng. dzIgul-. This transition had
already taken place in the later ages of the Latin, at all events, in the popular pronun ciation, as appears from such inscriptions as congiunta, for conjuncta; Zesu, for Jesu.
It was the Dutch scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries that first introduced a regu lar distinction between the consonantal and Vowel powers of i, and marked the forMer by the distinct characterj (a long i, projecting below the line). The character has been adopted in the modern Teutonic and Romanic languages. The Italian represents the sibilant sound of j by gi or ggi, as Giovanni, from Lat. Johannes; maggiore, from Let. major. In Span., it has a guttural power, and is interchangeable with z, as Xeres, or Jeres.