Буква «З» в кириллице: история и особенности

Letter of the Cyrillic script

Ze (З з; italics: З з) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced alveolar fricative , like the pronunciation of in "zebra". Ze is romanized using the Latin letter
The shape of Ze is very similar to the Arabic numeral three , and should not be confused with the Cyrillic letter E .

Ze is derived from the Greek letter Zeta (Ζ ζ). In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was (zemlja), meaning "earth". The shape of the letter originally looked similar to a Greek letter Ζ or Latin letter Z with a tail on the bottom Though a majuscule form of this variant is encoded in Unicode, historically it was only used as caseless or lowercase. In the Cyrillic numeral system, Zemlja had a value of 7. Medieval Cyrillic manuscripts and Church Slavonic printed books have two variant forms of the letter Zemlja: з and Only the form was used in the oldest ustav (uncial) writing style; з appeared in the later poluustav (half uncial) manuscripts and typescripts, where the two variants are found at proportions of about 1:1. Some early grammars tried to give a phonetic distinction to these forms (like palatalized vs. nonpalatalized sound), but the system had no further development. Ukrainian scribes and typographers began to regularly use З/з in an initial position, and otherwise (a system in use till the end of the 19th century). Russian scribes and typographers largely abandoned the widespread use of the variant in favor of з in the wake of Patriarch Nikon's reforms. They still used the older form mostly in the case of two З's in row: (the system in use till the mid 18th century). The civil (Petrine) script knows only one shape of the letter: З/з. However, shapes similar to Z/z can be used in certain stylish typefaces. In calligraphy and in general handwritten text, lowercase з can be written either fully over the baseline (similar to the printed form) or with the lower half under the baseline and with the loop (for the Russian language, a standard shape since the middle of the 20th century).

A letter that looks like Cyrillic Ze (actually, a stylization of digit 3) was used in the Latin Zhuang alphabet from 1957 to 1986 to represent the third (high) tone. In 1986, it was replaced by .