E

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses of "E", see E (disambiguation).
Look up E, e in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
E
Basic Latin alphabet
  Aa Bb Cc Dd  
Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj
Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv
  Ww Xx Yy Zz  

E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled e (pronounced /iː/), plural ees (rare).[1] The letter E is the most commonly used letter in the Czech,[2] Danish,[2] Dutch,[2] English,[3] French,[4] German,[5] Hungarian,[2] Latin,[2] Norwegian,[2] Spanish,[6] and Swedish languages.[2]

Contents

[edit] History

Egyptian hieroglyph
q’		 Proto-Semitic
H		 Phoenician
H		 Etruscan
E		 Greek
Epsilon		 Roman/Cyrillic
E
A28
Image:Proto-semiticE-01.png Image:Alfabeto_camuno-e.png Roman E

E is derived from the Greek letter epsilon which is much the same in appearance (Ε, ε) and function. In etymology, the Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure (hillul jubilation), and was probably based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that was pronounced and used quite differently. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek hê became Εψιλον (Epsilon) with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Arising from the Great Vowel Shift, English usage is rather different, namely /iː/ (derived from /eː/ in "me" or "bee") whereas other words like "bed" are closer to Latin and other languages in usage.

[edit] Usage

Like other Latin vowels, E came in a long and a short variety. Originally, the only difference was in length but later on, short e represented /ɛ/. In other languages that use the letter E or e, it represents various other phonetic values, sometimes with accents to indicate contrasts (e ê é è ë ē ĕ ě ẽ ė ẹ ę ẻ).

Digraphs starting with E are common in many languages to indicate diphthongs and monophthongs, such as EA or EE for /iː/ or /eɪ/ in English, EI for /aɪ/ in German, or EU for /ø/ in French or /ɔɪ/ in German.

At the end of a word, E is very often silent in English (silent e), where old noun inflections have been dropped, although even when silent at the end of a word it often causes vowels in the word to be pronounced as diphthongs, conventionally called long vowels (compare as a noun rat and as a verb rate).

The letter 'E' is the most common (or highest frequency) letter in the English language (starting off the typographer's phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU) and many other related languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression. This makes it a difficult and popular letter to use when writing lipograms. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939), is considered a "dreadful" novel, and that "at least part of Wright's narrative difficulties were caused by language restrictions imposed by the lack of E."[7] Both Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit the letter E and are considered better works.[8]

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of E
NATO phonetic Morse code
Echo ·
⠑
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

In Unicode the capital E is codepoint U+0045 and the lower case e is U+0065.

The ASCII code for capital E is 69 and for lowercase e is 101; or in binary 01000101 and 01100101, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital E is 197 and for lowercase e is 133.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "E" and "e" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] See also

Similar Latin letters:

Similar non-Latin letters:

Similar phonetic symbols:

Special symbols similar to the letter E:
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

[edit] References

  1. ^ "E" Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993). The plural of the letter, as opposed to the name, is E's, Es, e's, or es.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Kelk, Brian. "Letter frequencies". UK Free Software Network. Retrieved on 2008-06-25.
  3. ^ Lewand, Robert. "Relative Frequencies of Letters in General English Plain text". Cryptographical Mathematics. Central College. Retrieved on 2008-06-25.
  4. ^ "Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in French". Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Retrieved on 2008-06-25.
  5. ^ "Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in German". Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Retrieved on 2008-06-25.
  6. ^ "Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in Spanish". Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Retrieved on 2008-06-25.
  7. ^ Ross Eckler, Making the Alphabet Dance: Recreational Word Play. New York: St. Martin's Press (1996): 3
  8. ^ Eckler (1996): 3. Perec's novel "was so well written that at least some reviewers never realized the existence of a letter constraint."
The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter E with diacritics

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E"
Personal tools