• ‘E’ STARTS OUT life 3,800 years ago as a stick man with two arms but only one central leg, a continuation of his body. This is a Semitic letter probably named as ‘he’ and pronounced ‘h’. By the time the Phoenicians get hold of it in 1000 BCE it looks like a reverse form of our ‘f’ but with two horizontals instead of our one. It’s still pronounced ‘h’. The first ancient Greeks kept this but later either they or the early Romans flipped it. In around 700 BCE the sign came to indicate the sound ‘ee’. The Romans created the serif, thin-thick ‘E’.

e

Latin manuscripts from around AD 450 start to show the upright stroke bending into a crescent shape until the top two lines join up. It was this shape that the printers of the 1500s took as the lower-case ‘e’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French came to Britain pronouncing it along Etruscan lines as ‘ay’ and the Great Vowel Shift explains how it became ‘ee’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

In almost all counts, ‘e’ comes out as English’s most popular letter and with the rise of emails and e-commerce (‘e’ for electronic) its future at the top of the charts is assured. It’s present in some of the most commonly used words: ‘the’, ‘me’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘her’, ‘hers’, ‘their’, ‘theirs’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘where’, ‘some’, ‘same’, ‘are’, ‘be’, ‘have’ and ‘were’, along with many past tenses (ending in ‘-ed’) and plurals ending in ‘-es’ and ‘-ies’. As with all English vowels, ‘e’ is given many jobs to do, very few of which are 100 per cent consistent. We can be sure that in consonant-vowel-consonant formations like ‘peg’ and ‘bet’, it will be pronounced with the ‘short e’ – apart from in New Zealand.

We have several ways of getting it to signify the long ‘e’ – doubling it in ‘feet’, adding ‘a’ in ‘seat’, putting another kind of ‘e’ one consonant later as in ‘discrete’ and ‘Pete’. The one-consonant trick used to be called ‘the silent e’ or even ‘the magic e’. This was to ‘explain’ to children that ‘hat’ turned to ‘hate’ by magic. Present-day wisdom tries to show that the ‘a’ in ‘hate’ is made by both the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ one consonant later.

The history of this represents one of many efforts to make sense of English spelling. Some Old English words had a final ‘e’ that was sounded as a ‘schwa’ sound, as with ‘name’, pronounced as Germans do today ‘nah-mer’ (but without the ‘r’ being voiced). However, when ‘wif’ acquired its ‘long i’ as we say it today, the spelling reformers of the seventeenth century decided that long vowel sounds, like ‘ay’, ‘ee’, ‘i’ (as in ‘I’ on its own), ‘o’ (sounding like ‘owe’) and ‘u’ (sounding like ‘you’), should have an ‘e’ on the end of the word to tell readers what to do, thus: ‘same’, ‘Pete’, ‘wife’, ‘gnome’ and ‘plume’. All well and good, but there are some words ending with ‘e’ where the ‘e’ doesn’t do this kind of work for us: like ‘some’, ‘have’, ‘shove’ or ‘gone’. Loan words like ‘cafe’ (which has mostly dropped its French accent over the ‘e’) are a rule unto themselves.

Spelling reformers would have us adopting double-vowel letters: one long, one short, then all these complications could be stamped out. It would up the alphabet to thirty-one letters by adding a long ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ but would simplify spelling by miles. If for a moment we imagined that the long vowels were ‘aA’, ‘eE’, ‘iI’, ‘oO’ and ‘uU’, we could write, ‘MiI wiIf and iI lov eEting a niIc hot meEl at middaA.’ NeEt, eh?

The little ‘eh?’ sound is extremely useful, as it gives us a way of asking questions in different ways depending on the tone of the ‘eh?’ It can be inviting, contemptuous, rhetorical, all-knowing, wink-winking and so on.

‘Eeee’ can mean excitement or fear or a mock-version of both. ‘Eek’ is even more jokey. A Jamaican singer in the 1970s called himself ‘Eek-a-mouse’. One girls’ skipping song begins: ‘Eevy-ivy-over’.

For ‘er’ see ‘R’.