As a phonetic symbol, it originates with Isaac Pitman's English Phonotypic Alphabet in 1847, as a z with an added hook. The symbol is based on medieval cursive forms of Latin z, evolving into the blackletter z letter. In Unicode, however, the blackletter z is considered a glyph variant of z, and not an ezh. In contexts where "tailed z" is used in contrast to tail-less z, notably in standard transcription of Middle High German, Unicode ʒ is sometimes used, strictly speaking incorrectly. Unicode offers ȥ "z with hook" as a grapheme for Middle High German coronal fricative instead.
In Unicode 1.0, the character was unified with the unrelated character yogh, which was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 3.0. Historically, ezh is derived from Latin z, but yogh is derived from Latin g by way of insular G. The characters look very similar and do not appear alongside each other in any alphabet. To differentiate between the two more clearly, the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society extend the uppermost tip of the 'yogh' into a little curvature upward.
Relation to the digit three
The ezh looks similar to the common form of the figure three. To differentiate between the two characters, Ezh includes the sharp zigzag of the letter z, while the number is usually curved. This still remains a problem though, as some type fonts use a figure for "3" identical in shape to an ezh.
Similaritiy to hiragana ro
Ezh looks similar to ろ, the Japanese hiragana letter for the mora "ro". However, the central corner of ろ points out further away to the left than that of ezh.
Vague ties to the Cyrillic 'Ze'
The Cyrillic letter Ze, written as З or з, has a similar body to Ezh. As customary, the Cyrillic script has a stiffer structure, but both letters have common roots in historical cursive forms of ‘Z’, taken from the Greek letterZeta. The pronunciations of Latin Ezh and Cyrillic Ze, however, are different phonemes: while /Ӡ/ stands for the s in the wordvision, Russian Ze stands for z as in zebra. For the /Ӡ/ phoneme, Cyrillic uses 'Zhe '. Older Russian typewriters, often to save space, sometimes used З to write the numeral form of 3.
Usage
Language orthographies
In the InternationalPhonetic Alphabet it represents the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example: vision. It is pronounced as the "s" in "treasure" or the "si" in the word "precision". It is used with that value in Uropi. It is used in the "International Standard" orthography, as devised by Marcel Courthiade for Romani. It was also used in an obsolete Latin alphabet for writing Komi, where it represented . In the modern Cyrillic alphabet, this sound is written as дз.
In Unicode, a standard designed to allow symbols from all writing systems to be represented and manipulated by computers, the ezh is used as the symbol to represent the abbreviation for dram, an apothecaries' systemunit of mass.
Encoding and ligatures
The Unicode code points are U+01B7 for Ʒ and U+0292 for ʒ. The IPA historically allowed for ezh to be ligatured to other letters; some of these ligatures have been added to the Unicode standard.
