Ε

Sound value

While the original pronunciation of the Phoenician letter He was [h], the earliest Greek sound value of Ε was determined by the vowel occurring in the Phoenician letter name, which made it a natural choice for being reinterpreted from a consonant symbol to a vowel symbol denoting an [e] sound. Besides its classical Greek sound value, the short /e/ phoneme, it could initially also be used for other [e]-like sounds. For instance, in early Attic before c. 500 BC, it was used also both for the long, open/ɛː/, and for the long close/eː/. In the former role, it was later replaced in the classic Greek alphabet by Eta (⟨Η⟩), which was taken over from eastern Ionic alphabets, while in the latter role it was replaced by the digraph ⟨ΕΙ⟩.