The letter originated in the thirteenth century as a variant of, at first, according to Đorđić in superscripted line-final position, but by the end of the century elsewhere as well. In the following centuries it continued to appear sporadically as an uncommon variant of, but not later than in the fifteenth century amongst the Eastern Slavs it began to be used to indicate initial . According to Yefim Karskiy, "Western Russian ustav knows, e.g. in Miscellany of the 15th c. from the Public Library , chronicles of 15th-16th cc., Miscellany of Poznań, Statut of 1588... It is difficult to say whether it has been developed here independently or it came from South Slavic manuscripts, where occurs as early as in 13-14th cc." Although the revision of Meletius Smotrytsky’s grammar published in Moscow in 1648 does not include in its alphabet, it does consistently write , in contrast to in the first edition of 1619. It was by no means confined to this function in the period, however, as the prevalent spellings for modern Russian реестр, майор demonstrate.
In modern Russian
In the specimens of the civil script presented to Peter I in 1708, forms of were included among forms of, but the latter was deleted by Peter. The former was used in some early 18th-century Russian texts, but some authorities of the period considered it superfluous, like Mikhail Lomonosov, on the grounds that "the letter Е, having several different pronunciations, could serve in the pronoun етотъ and the interjection ей" and that it was inappropriate to introduce letters solely for use in loanwords. However, the inclusion of in its modern function, in the Russian Academy's Dictionary of 1789–94, marks the point from which it can be considered as an established part of the Russian orthographical standard. There were still some objections to the letter even as late as 1817, when was questioning whether "yet another hard э" was necessary when the language already had "a soft ѣ and a hard е". In contemporary Russian, is used to represent, in initial position and postvocalic position. Among such words are only a few native Russian roots: эт-, эк-, эдак-/этак- and a few interjections like эй 'hey', э 'uh, oh', э-э-э 'uh'. Even though Russian contains a significant number of loanwords in which occurs after a hard consonant, it is still the practice to use the letter for, : теннис, сепсис. There are few traditional exceptions to that practice among common noun loanwords:
the original list contained just three words:
* мэр 'mayor', from French 'maire'
* пэр 'peer ', from French 'pair'
* сэр 'sir', from English or from Old French 'sieur'
two later additions :
* мэтр 'master, skilled artist', from French 'maître'
* пленэр, from French 's, however, may occur after consonants: Улан-Удэ 'Ulan-Ude' and Блэр 'Blair'. However, many such loanwords are spelled with : Блерио 'Blériot'. That is the case especially for names that entered the language centuries ago like: Берлин, 'Berlin'. The use of is much more frequent for names from non-European languages: Мао Цзэдун 'Mao Zedong'.
The letter is also used in Russian to render initial in foreign words: thus Eure is written Эр. After consonants this is transcribed as. In the 19th century, some writers used for that sound in both positions, but that was never accepted as standard orthography. It is also used to represent a stressed in languages such as English, which can cause a problem of conflating with English . However, in other positions, Russian also uses for and for.
In modern Belarusian
Unlike Russian, Belarusian has many native words in which it occurs after a hard consonant. Moreover, its orthography was standardized later than that of Russian, on the basis of the spoken language rather than historical tradition. Consequently, and are written in accordance with pronunciation: for initial and after hard consonants, for initial and postvocalic and after soft consonants. That also means that is much more frequent in Belarusian than in Russian.
In other languages
In Tuvan the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel. In the Tajik language, the letters е and э have the same function, except that э is used at the beginning of a word. In Mongolian, э is the standard letter to represent the /ɛ/ phoneme. It is often written doubled to represent the /eː/ phoneme. Е, however, is only used in the few Mongolian words containing it, Russian loanwords and Russian-style transcriptions of foreign names.
