Latin epsilon or open E (majuscule: Ɛ, minuscule: ɛ) is a letter of the extended

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

, based on the

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

of the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

letter epsilon (ε). It occurs in the orthographies of many Niger–Congo and

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. ...

languages, such as Ewe,

Akan Akan may refer to: People and languages *Akan people, an ethnic group in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire *Akan language Akan () is a Central Tano languages, Central Tano language and the principal native language of the Akan people of Ghana, spoken ...

Lingala Lingala (Ngala) (Lingala: ''Lingála'') is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree ...

Dinka The Dinka people ( din, Jiɛ̈ɛ̈ŋ) are a Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan with a sizable diaspora population abroad. The Dinka mostly live along the Nile, from Jonglei to Renk, in the region of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile (two out of ...

and

Maasai Maasai may refer to: *Maasai people *Maasai language *Maasai mythology The Maasai mythology or Maasai religion are the traditional beliefs of the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania. In Maasai culture, nature and its elements are important facets ...

, for the vowel or , and is included in the

African reference alphabet An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) ...

. In the Berber Latin alphabet currently used in Algerian Berber school books, and before that proposed by the French institute

INALCO Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales ( en, National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations), abbreviated as INALCO, is a French university specializing in the teaching of languages and cultures from the world. ...

, it represents a

voiced pharyngeal fricative The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglott ...

. Some authors use ƹayin instead; both letters are similar in shape with the Arabic ʿayn . The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses various forms of the Latin epsilon: * represents the

open-mid front unrounded vowel The open-mid front unrounded vowel, or low-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is a Latinised varia ...

* represents the rhotacized open-mid central vowel * represents the

open-mid central rounded vowel The open-mid central rounded vowel, or low-mid central rounded vowel, is a vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA The Extended ...

(shown as on the 1993 IPA chart) The

Uralic Phonetic Alphabet The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Ne ...

uses various forms of the Latin epsilon: * * *

Unicode

Latin epsilon is called "Open E" in Unicode.

References

{{Latin script Ez Ez Vowel letters

Unicode

See also

References