Bansiot

ㅿ was a voiced equivalent of ㅅ.^[4][5] Its use was generally restricted to the word medial position (i.e. not the initial or final consonant of a word), although it was sometimes used as the first initial consonant of a word.^[6] It was used in the initial position to represent some Late Middle Chinese sounds, like ᅀᅵᆯ (日; lit. 'day') or ᅀᅵᆫ (人; lit. 'man'); when used for such cases, its Sino-Korean pronunciation was possibly [ʐ].^[7] Early Hangul texts sometimes used it similarly to the saisiot; for example, 太子 ㅿ 位 ([tajdza ㅿ we]; lit. 'the prince's position') appears in Yongbiŏch'ŏn'ga. This type of usage eventually disappeared.^[8]

ㅿ fell out of significant use to represent Korean by around the 1570s to 1580s. By this point, its corresponding phoneme had disappeared out of the language.^[4] In many cases, its sound simply ceased to be used in words; for example, Middle Korean ᄆᆞᅀᆞᆶ (lit. 'village') has since become 마을 in modern Standard Korean.^[9] In a subset of cases, the loss of ㅿ across adjacent vowels resulted in a simpler word with a long vowel. For example, 기ᅀᅳᆷ〮 → 김 (lit. 'gim').^[10] In rare cases, it was replaced with a ㅅ.^[9] Its role eventually came to be replaced by ㅇ.^[4] It continued to see some limited use for the transcription of foreign languages thereafter.^[11]