Where did E come from?
The letter E, as amazing and powerful as it is, has not always existed as we know it. It may be difficult to imagine a world without E. It’s such a huge part of our society today.But there was once a time before the amazing letter known as E inhabited our literature.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where E came from, but the earliest depiction of E is believed to be a Semitic consonant used to represent an H sound.
The Greeks adopted this letter and turned it into the Greek letter epsilon, which is where the latin E that is used in modern English came from.
The pronunciation of modern E has changed over the past centuries. It used to be pronounced like the long a sound in words such as hate or blade, but during the Great Vowel Shift between 1400 and 1700, the pronunciation shifted to match the modern long e sound. Scholars are unsure of why this shift took place.
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