Е, the letter ye

History

Е is the sixth letter of the modern Russian alphabet, known in Russian and Belarusian as Ye, Je or Ie, and called E in some languages. It commonly represents the vowel [e] or [ɛ], like the e in yes. It was derived from the Phoenician letter he and the Greek letter epsilon (Ε ε), and its shape is very similar to the Latin letter E.

How it is romanized depends on the language and on the system in use. It is written E for Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian and Rusyn, and occasionally for Russian, as in Озеро Байкал rendered Ozero Baykal; Je for Belarusian, as in Заслаўе rendered Zaslaŭje; Ye for Russian, as in Европа rendered Yevropa; and Ie occasionally for Russian, as in Днепр rendered Dniepr, and for Belarusian. Two indexes of the same parish register can therefore spell one family name in two ways without either being wrong.

The 1918 reform bears on this letter more than on most. Russian orthography was simplified by conflating the letter ѣ with е, so дѣти became дети and Сѣверо-Американскіе became Северо-Американские. The reform removed pairs of completely homophonous graphemes from the alphabet, ѣ and Е among them, bringing the alphabet closer to the phonological system of the language. A word carrying е in a modern edition may therefore stand where the original document carries yat, and the difference between the two pages is one of spelling rather than of wording.

Russian cursive, the hand in which most personal documents were written, was developed during the 18th century on the base of the earlier Cyrillic tachygraphic writing known as skoropis, the rapid or running script, which in turn was the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhand scripts called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books.