Alphabet Letters
E ܥ
Syriac Letters
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Origin The script is attested from the early centuries CE, in the Aramaic of Edessa
E is the sixteenth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value seventy. It writes a voiced pharyngeal, the second of the two pharyngeals Syriac keeps from its Semitic inheritance, and it stands in the sequence where Hebrew has ayin, whose name it continues. It joins on both sides. Its name is the inherited word for an eye. English descriptions transliterate that name in several ways, and the modern character standard records the letter simply as E, which is why the sixteenth letter of a Semitic abjad can turn up in a list of names looking like a Latin vowel.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe script is attested from the early centuries CE, in the Aramaic of Edessa 1Tradition: The Syriac script Place of OriginEdessa, in Osrhoene, from the local cursive form of the Aramaic script 1Tradition: The Syriac script Origin of the NameThe letter names continue Northwest Semitic nouns inherited from the older linear alphabet, and are not ordinary Syriac words 1Tradition: The Syriac script Origin of the NameThe pictographic senses behind the names describe signs of the older linear alphabet, not the Syriac shapes 1Tradition: The Syriac script Sense of the Nameeye, by inheritance from the Northwest Semitic name 1Tradition: The Syriac script Identity
Script TypeAn abjad: the twenty-two letters record consonants, and vowels are supplied either by points or by small Greek letters written above and below the line 1Tradition: The Syriac script PositionSixteenth of the twenty-two letters, with the numeral value 70 1Tradition: The Syriac script How the Letter JoinsJoins on both sides, taking initial, medial, final and isolated shapes 2Tradition: The Syriac script Transmission
Manuscript TraditionThree hands write the same twenty-two letters: Estrangela, the oldest book hand, Serto in the west, and Madnhaya in the east 1Tradition: The Syriac script Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced pharyngeal, the counterpart of Hebrew ayin 1Tradition: The Syriac script Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script is in current liturgical use in the Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Maronite, Assyrian Church of the East and Chaldean Catholic churches 3Tradition: Syriac Christianity Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe letters carry numeral values, and a mark written below a letter can multiply its value for figures larger than the letters themselves supply 2Tradition: Syriac numerals Learn More
E: The Syriac Letter
E is the sixteenth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value seventy. It writes a voiced pharyngeal, the second of the two pharyngeals that Syriac keeps from its Semitic inheritance, the other being heth at the eighth place. It joins on both sides.
It stands in the sequence where Hebrew has ayin, whose name it continues, and its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for an eye.
The oddity here is the name as it appears in this atlas and in character standards generally. English descriptions transliterate the Syriac name in several ways, none of which is wrong and none of which has become the single convention, and the modern character standard settled on recording the letter simply as E. That is why the sixteenth letter of a Semitic abjad can turn up in a list of letter names looking like a Latin vowel, which it is not and never was.
The sound is worth being clear about too. A voiced pharyngeal has no counterpart in most European languages, and it is not a vowel, not silent, and not a glottal stop. In the classical reading it is a consonant made deep in the throat. In several of the modern spoken descendants of Syriac the pharyngeals have weakened, so the letter is written where the classical spelling calls for it and read according to the tradition of the community reading it.
E and the Trouble With Naming a Letter
Naming the letters of a script that is not written in Latin characters is harder than it looks, and the sixteenth Syriac letter is the clearest case in the alphabet. Its Syriac name continues the old word for an eye; the sound it begins with is a pharyngeal that Latin letters have no sign for; and every scheme for writing it in English has had to choose between a diacritic that most readers cannot type, an apostrophe that most systems will mangle, and simply leaving it out.
The modern character standard needs a name that works in plain ASCII, without diacritics, unambiguously, forever, so it took the last option and recorded the letter as E. That name is now what most references, fonts and software show, including this one.
The same pressure produces other surprises across the scripts in this atlas. Mandaic asz is spelled with sz for no reason internal to Mandaic, only to keep it apart from as in a scheme with no diacritics available. Syriac letter names appear in half a dozen spellings across the reference literature.
None of this is a fact about the letters, and it is worth saying plainly, because a reader meeting the name E in a list of Semitic letters can reasonably conclude that something has gone wrong. Nothing has. It is a naming convention doing its job under a constraint, and the letter behind it is the one Hebrew calls ayin.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Syriac E and Hebrew Ayin stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 70. The Syriac script grew out of the local Aramaic cursive of Edessa and the Hebrew square script out of the same Aramaic alphabet, so the two letters are inherited from one ancestor rather than borrowed from each other.
Ayn and the Syriac letter of the same value continue the Semitic pharyngeal. Both branches also merged into it the voiced velar fricative that Arabic still writes as ghayn.
Syriac E and Arabic Ayn answer to one another in the abjad order, the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence Arabic keeps for its letter numerals, and both carry the value 70. A shared ancestor and not a borrowing, since Arabic reached the sequence through Nabataean.
Mandaic In and Syriac E hold the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence both alphabets inherited. The shapes are unrelated to look at, so it is the order that carries the descent. Where the Mandaic shapes came from is disputed, a cursive Aramaic hand or the Parthian chancery script.
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