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E (Cyrillic)
Encyclopedia
E also known as Backwards E from , E oborotnoye, is a letter found amongst Slavonic languages only in Russian
and Belarusian
, representing the sounds e and ɛ. In other Slavonic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet
, these sounds are represented by Ye
(Е е), which in Russian and Belarusian represents je in initial and post-vocalic position or else e after a palatalised consonant
. In Cyrillic Moldovan
, which was used in the Moldovan SSR during Soviet
times and is still used in Transnistria
, this letter corresponds to ă
in the Latin Romanian alphabet
. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian
and many Uralic
, Caucasian
and Turkic languages
of the former Soviet Union.
, who disapproved of it, this usage was invented by “certain Belarusians”. Although the revision of Meletij Smotrickij
’s grammar published in Moscow in 1648 does not include in its alphabet, it does consistently write , in contrast to in the first edition of 1619. It was by no means confined to this function in the period, however, as the prevalent spellings (beside ) demonstrate.
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In the specimens of the civil script presented to Peter I
in 1708, forms of ⟨э⟩ were included among forms of , but the “forwards” forms were deleted by Peter, leaving only ⟨э⟩ as a letter of the new alphabet. It was used in some early eighteenth-century Russian texts, but some authorities of the period considered it superfluous. This was the view taken by Lomonosov
, on the grounds that, on the one hand, “the letter Е, having several different pronunciations, could serve in the pronoun and the interjection ”, and on the other that it was inappropriate to introduce letters solely for use in loan words. However, the inclusion of ⟨Э⟩ in its modern function in the Russian Academy’s Dictionary of 1789–94 marks the point from which it can be considered as an established part of the Russian orthographical standard.
There was still some objection to the letter even as late as 1817, when M. T. Kačenovskij was questioning whether “yet another hard э” was necessary when the language already had “a soft ѣ and a hard е”.
In contemporary Russian, ⟨э⟩ is used to represent e, ɛ in initial and post-vocalic position. There are very few native Russian words (apart from ) where this sound occurs, so the letter is mostly found in words of foreign origin such as . It does not normally occur after consonants, even though Russian contains a significant number of words of foreign origin in which e occurs after a hard (unpalatalised) consonant; these are normally written with ⟨е⟩, for example . The only frequently used common name with this use is the word - mayor, from French .
In proper names, however, ⟨э⟩ may occur after consonants, though not normally in those with a long history in the language, such as , Berlin. Indeed, it is becoming much more prevalent in recent borrowings: thus the established transcription for the surname Blair is , whereas that for (the French aviator) is . It is also much more usual for names of Oriental origin than for those derived from European languages (for example, for Mao Tse-tung).
The letter ⟨э⟩ is also used in Russian to render initial œ in foreign words: thus (the French river) is written . After consonants this is transcribed as ⟨ё⟩. In the nineteenth century some writers used ⟨ӭ⟩ for this sound in both these positions, but this was never accepted as standard orthography. (The letter ⟨ӭ⟩ was re-invented in the twentieth century for Kildin Sami.) It is also used to represent a stressed initial or post-vocalic æ in languages such as English, which incidentally can cause a problem of conflating æ with English ɛ. (But, in other positions, Russian also uses ⟨а⟩ for æ and ⟨е⟩ for ɛ.)
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
and Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
, representing the sounds e and ɛ. In other Slavonic languages using a Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, these sounds are represented by Ye
Ye (Cyrillic)
Ye is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. In some languages this letter is called E.It commonly represents the vowel or , like the pronunciation of ⟨e⟩ in "yes".Ye is romanized using the Latin letter E....
(Е е), which in Russian and Belarusian represents je in initial and post-vocalic position or else e after a palatalised consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
. In Cyrillic Moldovan
Moldovan alphabet
The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet designed for the Moldovan language in the Soviet Union and used from 1938 to 1989 . Its introduction was decided by the Central Executive Committee of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on May 19, 1938...
, which was used in the Moldovan SSR during Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
times and is still used in Transnistria
Transnistria
Transnistria is a breakaway territory located mostly on a strip of land between the Dniester River and the eastern Moldovan border to Ukraine...
, this letter corresponds to ă
A
A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...
in the Latin Romanian alphabet
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters:The letters Q , W , and Y were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier...
. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
and many Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
, Caucasian
Languages of the Caucasus
The languages of the Caucasus are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....
and Turkic languages
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
of the former Soviet Union.
Origin
The letter originated in the thirteenth century as a variant of , at first, according to Djordjić in superscripted line-final position, but by the end of the century elsewhere as well. In the following centuries it continued to appear sporadically as an uncommon variant of ⟨є⟩, but in the seventeenth century amongst the Eastern Slavs it began to be used to indicate initial (un-iotated) e. According to KrižanićJuraj Križanic
Juraj Križanić , also known as Yuriy Krizhanich, was a Croatian Catholic missionary who is often regarded as the earliest recorded pan-Slavist and anti-Normanist.-Early life, education, and early missionary work:...
, who disapproved of it, this usage was invented by “certain Belarusians”. Although the revision of Meletij Smotrickij
Meletius Smotrytsky
Meletius Smotrytsky , né Maksym Herasymovytch was a Ruthenian linguist from Galicia, author and religious activist. Son of the famous Ukrainian religious and political activist Herasym Smotrytsky. He was educated in Ostroh and Vilnius, as well as Leipzig, Wittenberg and Nuremberg...
’s grammar published in Moscow in 1648 does not include in its alphabet, it does consistently write , in contrast to in the first edition of 1619. It was by no means confined to this function in the period, however, as the prevalent spellings (beside ) demonstrate.
⟨Э⟩ in modern Russian
Peter I of Russia
Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style. ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother, Ivan V...
in 1708, forms of ⟨э⟩ were included among forms of , but the “forwards” forms were deleted by Peter, leaving only ⟨э⟩ as a letter of the new alphabet. It was used in some early eighteenth-century Russian texts, but some authorities of the period considered it superfluous. This was the view taken by Lomonosov
Mikhail Lomonosov
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art,...
, on the grounds that, on the one hand, “the letter Е, having several different pronunciations, could serve in the pronoun and the interjection ”, and on the other that it was inappropriate to introduce letters solely for use in loan words. However, the inclusion of ⟨Э⟩ in its modern function in the Russian Academy’s Dictionary of 1789–94 marks the point from which it can be considered as an established part of the Russian orthographical standard.
There was still some objection to the letter even as late as 1817, when M. T. Kačenovskij was questioning whether “yet another hard э” was necessary when the language already had “a soft ѣ and a hard е”.
In contemporary Russian, ⟨э⟩ is used to represent e, ɛ in initial and post-vocalic position. There are very few native Russian words (apart from ) where this sound occurs, so the letter is mostly found in words of foreign origin such as . It does not normally occur after consonants, even though Russian contains a significant number of words of foreign origin in which e occurs after a hard (unpalatalised) consonant; these are normally written with ⟨е⟩, for example . The only frequently used common name with this use is the word - mayor, from French .
In proper names, however, ⟨э⟩ may occur after consonants, though not normally in those with a long history in the language, such as , Berlin. Indeed, it is becoming much more prevalent in recent borrowings: thus the established transcription for the surname Blair is , whereas that for (the French aviator) is . It is also much more usual for names of Oriental origin than for those derived from European languages (for example, for Mao Tse-tung).
The letter ⟨э⟩ is also used in Russian to render initial œ in foreign words: thus (the French river) is written . After consonants this is transcribed as ⟨ё⟩. In the nineteenth century some writers used ⟨ӭ⟩ for this sound in both these positions, but this was never accepted as standard orthography. (The letter ⟨ӭ⟩ was re-invented in the twentieth century for Kildin Sami.) It is also used to represent a stressed initial or post-vocalic æ in languages such as English, which incidentally can cause a problem of conflating æ with English ɛ. (But, in other positions, Russian also uses ⟨а⟩ for æ and ⟨е⟩ for ɛ.)
⟨Э⟩ in modern Belarusian
Unlike Russian, Belarusian has many native words in which e occurs after a hard consonant. Moreover, its orthography was standardised later than that of Russian (reaching its present form at the beginning of the twentieth century), and on the basis of the spoken language rather than historical tradition. Consequently, ⟨э⟩ and ⟨е⟩ are written in accordance with pronunciation: ⟨э⟩ for initial e and after hard consonants, and ⟨е⟩ for initial and post-vocalic je and after soft consonants. This also means that ⟨э⟩ is much more frequent in Belarusian than in Russian.Related letters and other similar characters
- Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
- Є є : Cyrillic letter Ukrainian Ye
- E e : Latin letter EEE is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
Computing codes
| character | Э | э | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER E | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER E | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1069 | 042D | 1101 | 044D |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
208 173 | D0 AD | 209 141 | D1 8D |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Э | Э | э | э |
| KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters... and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
252 | FC | 220 | DC |
| Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:... |
248 | F8 | 247 | F7 |
| Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87... |
157 | 9D | 237 | ED |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
221 | DD | 253 | FD |
| ISO-8859-5 | 205 | CD | 237 | ED |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 157 | 9D | 253 | FD |