E (Е е; italics:
Е е), known in Russian and Belarusian as Ye, Je, or Ie, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In some languages this letter is called E. It commonly represents the vowel pronounced as /[e]/ or pronounced as /[ɛ]/, like the pronunciation of in "yes". It was derived from the Greek letter epsilon (Ε ε), and the shape is very similar to the Latin letter E or another version of E (Cyrillic).Ye is romanized using the Latin letter E for Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian and Rusyn, and occasionally Russian (Озеро Байкал, Ozero Baykal), Je for Belarusian (Заслаўе, Zaslaŭje), Ye for Russian (Европа, Yevropa), and Ie occasionally for Russian (Днепр, Dniepr) and Belarusian (Маладзе́чна, Maladziečna).
In Russian, the letter can follow unpalatalized consonants, especially,, and . In some loanwords, other consonants before (especially,,,,, and) are also not palatalized, see E (Cyrillic). The letter also represents pronounced as //jo// (as in "yogurt") and pronounced as //o// after palatalized consonants,, and . In these cases, may be used, see Yo (Cyrillic). In unstressed syllables, represents reduced vowels like pronounced as /[ɪ]/, see Russian phonology and Vowel reduction in Russian.
This letter is called E, and represents the vowel phoneme pronounced as //e// (phonetically pronounced as /[e]/ or pronounced as /[ɛ]/), like the pronunciation of in the word "set".
The letter represents the sound pronounced as //jo// at the beginning of words (yo represents pronounced as //jɔ//), and also represents pronounced as //je// at the beginning of some words and in the middle or end of words and pronounced as //e// in Russian loanwords and transcriptions of foreign names.
In Turkic languages utilizing the Cyrillic script (such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek) and in Tajik, Ye is used to represent the phoneme pronounced as /link/~pronounced as /link/, both word-finally and medially. Isolated, word-initially, or vowel-succeeding, this letter is substituted with the letter Э. If the letter Ye occurs word-initially, isolated, or vowel-succeeding, it represents the phoneme /je/~/jɛ/. This is done in imitation of the Russian usage, as many of these languages received Cyrillic orthographies as part of Russification in the Soviet Union.