Ę (minuscule: ę; Polish: e z [[ogonek|ogonkiem]], "e with a little tail"; Lithuanian: e nosinė, "nasal e") is a letter in the Polish, Lithuanian, and Dalecarlian alphabets. It is also used in Navajo to represent the nasal vowel pronounced as /[ẽ]/ and Kensiu to represent the near-close near-front unrounded vowel pronounced as /[e̝]/. In Latin, Irish, and Old Norse palaeography, it is known as e caudata ('tailed e
In the Polish alphabet, ę comes after e. It never appears word-initially, except for the onomatopoeia ęsi. It does not have one determined pronunciation and instead, its pronunciation is dependent on the sounds it is followed by.
| Pronunciation | Example | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phonemic | Phonetic | Orthography | Pronunciation(phonemic) | Pronunciation(phonetic) | ||
| ę + f, w, s, z, sz, ż, rz, h, ch | pronounced as //ɛŋ// | pronounced as /[ɛw̃]/ | ('bite') | pronounced as //kɛŋs// | pronounced as /[kɛw̃s]/ | |
| ę + k, g | pronounced as /[ɛŋ]/ | ('fear') | pronounced as //lɛŋk// | pronounced as /[lɛŋk]/ | ||
| ę + t, d, c, dz, cz, dż | pronounced as //ɛn// | pronounced as /[ɛn̪]/ | ('I will be') | pronounced as //ˈbɛndɛ// | pronounced as /[ˈbɛn̪d̪ɛ]/ | |
| ę + p, b | pronounced as //ɛm// | pronounced as /[ɛm]/ | ('vulture') | pronounced as //sɛmp// | pronounced as /[sɛmp]/ | |
| ę + ś, ź, ć, dź, si, zi, ci, dzi | pronounced as //ɛɲ// | pronounced as /[ɛj̃]/ | ('it will be') | pronounced as //ˈbɛɲd͡ʑɛ// | pronounced as /[ˈbɛj̃d͡ʑɛ]/ | |
| ę + l, ł; word-finally | pronounced as //ɛ// | pronounced as /[ɛ]/ | ('you') | pronounced as //t͡ɕɛ// | pronounced as /[t͡ɕɛ]/ | |
See main article: History of Polish orthography. In Old Polish, nasal vowels were either not indicated at all or indicated with digraphs including a nasal consonant; Ø was also used. During the first decades after the introduction of movable type to Poland (exclusively blackletter at the time) a need to standardize orthography developed, and in the early 16th century Stanisław Zaborowski, inspired by Old Czech orthography reform by Jan Hus, analyzed Polish phonology and in Orthographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi Polonicum idioma quam utilissimus proposed to add diacritics to Polish, including to mark nasal vowels with strokes. In particular, he proposed to write the nasal e sound as a with semivirgula superior (the letter was used to spell the phoneme traditionally because it was the original medieval pronunciation, see below), which printers of the time found not very convenient, and instead, Hieronymus Vietor crossed the lower part of an e. Later, when Polish printers began to use antiqua in the late 16th-century, Jan Januszowski took E caudata from Latin lettercase so as not to cast a new letter.
Polish ę sound evolved from the short nasal a of medieval Polish, which developed into a short nasal e in the modern language. The medieval vowel, along with its long counterpart, evolved in turn from the merged nasal *ę and *ǫ of Late Proto-Slavic:
| Early Proto-Slavic |
| |
| Late Proto-Slavic | pronounced as //ẽ// and pronounced as //õ//, transcribed by and | |
| Medieval Polish | short and long pronounced as //ã//, written approximately | |
| Modern Polish | short pronounced as //ã// → pronounced as //ɛŋ//, pronounced as //ɛn//, pronounced as //ɛm//, written long pronounced as //ã// → pronounced as //ɔŋ//, pronounced as //ɔn//, pronounced as //ɔm//, written |
Ę often alternates with ą:
In Lithuanian, the ogonek, called the nosinė (literally, "nasal") mark, originally indicated vowel nasalization, but around the late 17th century, nasal vowels gradually evolved into the corresponding long non-nasal vowels in most dialects. Thus, the mark is now de facto an indicator of vowel length (the length of etymologically non-nasal vowels is marked differently), and formerly nasal en/em forms are now pronounced pronounced as /[eː]/, as in Lithuanian: kęsti (to suffer) – Lithuanian: kenčia (is suffering or suffers), so the ę is no longer nasal.
The ogonek also helps to distinguish different grammatical forms which otherwise have the same written form but are pronounced differently. For example, for some forms of the noun, ę is used at the end of the word for the accusative case, as in Lithuanian: eglę, accusative of Lithuanian: eglė (spruce). It is also used to change past tense verb to the participle in the past, e.g., Lithuanian: tempė to Lithuanian: tempęs – somebody who has pulled.
In some cases, ą, ę and į (but never ė) may be used for different forms, as in Lithuanian: tąsa (extension) – Lithuanian: tęsia (extends) – Lithuanian: tįsoti (to lie extended). Finally, some verbs have the letter in the middle of the word only in the present tense, e.g., Lithuanian: gęsta (is going off) but not Lithuanian: užgeso (went off).[1]
Unlike with į or ą, no Lithuanian word is known to start with ę.[2]