The grapheme Ě, ě (E with háček) is used in the Czech alphabet.
The letter ě is a vestige of Old-Czech palatalization. The originally palatalizing phoneme /ě/ [ʲɛ] became extinct, changing to [ɛ] or [jɛ], but it is preserved as a grapheme.
This letter never appears in the initial position, and its pronunciation depends on the preceding consonant:
- Dě, tě, ně [ɟɛ, cɛ, ɲɛ] is written instead of ďe, ťe, ňe (analogically to di, ti, ni).
- Bě, pě, vě, fě is written instead of bje, pje, vje, fje. But in some words (vjezd, entry, drive-in, objem, volume), bje, vje is written because –je- is preceded by prefixes v- or ob- in such cases.
- Mě [mɲɛ] is written instead of mňe. For etymological reasons, mně is written in some words (jemný, soft -> jemně, softly).
See also
| The Basic modern Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
|
Letter E with diacritics
Letters using caron sign
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
