Editing Epsilon (section)

==History==

===Origin===
The letter {{angbr|Ε}} was adopted from the [[Phoenician alphabet|Phoenician]] letter [[He (letter)|He]] (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Phoenician he.svg|inline|x12px|alt=A letter that looks like a capital E with arms pointing left instead of right]]</span>) when Greeks first adopted alphabetic writing. In archaic Greek writing, its shape is often still identical to that of the Phoenician letter. Like other Greek letters, it could face either leftward or rightward (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Epsilon left.svg|inline|x14px]][[File:Greek Epsilon archaic.svg|inline|x14px]]</span>), depending on the current writing direction, but, just as in Phoenician, the horizontal bars always faced in the direction of writing. Archaic writing often preserves the Phoenician form with a vertical stem extending slightly below the lowest horizontal bar. In the classical era, through the influence of more cursive writing styles, the shape was simplified to the current {{angbr|E}} glyph.<ref name="jeffery63">{{cite book |last=Jeffery |first=Lilian H. |title=The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece |publisher=Clarendon |year=1961 |place=Oxford |pages=63–64}}</ref>

===Sound value===
While the original pronunciation of the Phoenician letter ''He'' was {{IPA|[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 {{IPA|[e]}} sound.<ref name="jeffery24">Jeffery, ''Local Scripts of Archaic Greece'', p. 24.</ref> Besides its classical Greek sound value, the short {{IPA|/e/}} phoneme, it could initially also be used for other {{IPA|[e]}}-like sounds. For instance, in early [[Attic Greek|Attic]] before {{Circa|500 BC}}, it was used also both for the long, [[open-mid vowel|open]] {{IPA|/ɛː/}}, and for the long [[close-mid vowel|close]] {{IPA|/eː/}}. In the former role, it was later replaced in the classic Greek alphabet by [[Eta]] ({{angbr|Η}}), which was taken over from eastern [[Ionic Greek|Ionic]] alphabets, while in the latter role it was replaced by the [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]] ⟨ΕΙ⟩.

===[[Archaic Greek alphabets#epichoric|Epichoric]] alphabets===
Some dialects used yet other ways of distinguishing between various e-like sounds.

In [[Ancient Corinth|Corinth]], the normal function of {{angbr|Ε}} to denote {{IPA|/e/}} and {{IPA|/ɛː/}} was taken by a glyph resembling a pointed B (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Beta archaic.svg|inline|x14px]]</span>), while {{angbr|Ε}} was used only for long close {{IPA|/eː/}}.<ref name="jeffery114">Jeffery, ''Local Scripts of Archaic Greece'', p. 114.</ref> The letter [[Beta]], in turn, took the deviant shape <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Beta Corinth 1.svg|inline|x14px]]</span>.

In [[Sicyon]], a variant glyph resembling an {{angbr|X}} (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Epsilon X-shaped.svg|inline|x14px]]</span>) was used in the same function as Corinthian <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Beta archaic.svg|inline|x14px]]</span>.<ref name="jeffery138">Jeffery, ''Local Scripts of Archaic Greece'', p. 138.</ref>

In [[Thespiae|Thespiai]] ([[Boeotia]]), a special letter form consisting of a vertical stem with a single rightward-pointing horizontal bar (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Eta tack.svg|inline|x12px]]</span>) was used for what was probably a [[close vowel|raised]] variant of {{IPA|/e/}} in pre-vocalic environments.<ref name="nicholas2">{{cite web |last=Nicholas |first=Nick |title=Proposal to add Greek epigraphical letters to the UCS |url=http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/epigraphical.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060217000025/http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/epigraphical.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-date=February 17, 2006 |access-date=2010-08-12 |year=2005 }}</ref><ref name="jeffery89">Jeffery, ''Local Scripts of Archaic Greece'', p. 89.</ref> This tack glyph was used elsewhere also as a form of "[[Heta]]", i.e. for the sound {{IPA|/h/}}.

{{anchor|ϵ|Lunate epsilon|lunate epsilon}}<!--linked from [[Romanization of Greek]], [[ϵ]], [[Lunate epsilon]], &c.-->

===Glyph variants===
After the establishment of the canonical Ionian (Euclidean) [[Greek alphabet]], new glyph variants for Ε were introduced through handwriting. In the [[uncial script]] (used for literary [[papyrus]] manuscripts in late antiquity and then in early medieval [[vellum]] codices), the "[[lunate]]" shape (<span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek uncial Epsilon.svg|inline|x12px]]</span>) became predominant. In [[cursive]] handwriting, a large number of shorthand glyphs came to be used, where the cross-bar and the curved stroke were linked in various ways.<ref name="thompson">{{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Edward M. |title=An Introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography |publisher=Clarendon |year=1911 |place=Oxford |pages=191–194}}</ref> Some of them resembled a modern lowercase Latin "e", some a "6" with a connecting stroke to the next letter starting from the middle, and some a combination of two small "c"-like curves. Several of these shapes were later taken over into [[minuscule Greek|minuscule]] book hand. Of the various minuscule letter shapes, the inverted-3 form became the basis for lower-case Epsilon in Greek typography during the modern era.

{|class="wikitable"
!Uncial
!Uncial variants
!Cursive variants
!Minuscule
!Minuscule with ligatures
|-
|style="background-color: white !important;"|[[File:Greek uncial Epsilon.svg|inline|x20px]]
|style="background-color: white !important;"|[[File:Greek uncial variants Epsilon.svg|inline|x30px]]
|style="background-color: white !important;"|[[File:Greek cursive variants Epsilon.svg|inline|x30px]]
|style="background-color: white !important;"|[[File:Greek minuscule Epsilon.svg|inline|x40px]]
|style="background-color: white !important;"|[[File:Greek minuscule Epsilon with ligatures.svg|inline|x40px]]
|}