Editing Epsilon (section)

===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⟩.