# .font: font.text_2
2023-01-23 20:56 dustin  
# .font: font.text_1
in the fifth cave of his abc journey, Κ finds out that the letter "e" used to be a cheering human! he feels as if dozens of voodoos were cheering him on to keep the ΖΖΖ away from them!  
  
history of the letter "e":  
  
| the basic egyptian/ proto-sinaitic glyph was likely a human in jubilation (or perhaps praying) pose (left voodoo shape).  the top-right shows the first steps of simplifying the glyph.  
  
| the phoenicians still changed the simplified glyph a bit and adapted the letter as "he" to become the fifth letter of their alphabet (see the bottom-right shape). "he" might have been the phoenician word for "jubilation", but possibly it also meant "window"  
  
| you might wonder why the phoenician name "he" doesn't start with "e". but don't forget that neither the egyptians nor the phoenicians used letters for vowels! instead, "he" was spoken like [h] as in "hidden exit" or "house".  
  
Β the ancient greek adapted the form of the letter, symmetrized it and later mirrored it when they changed the writing direction from right-to-left to left-to-right. now the letter had the "e" shape as we know it today.  
as for the sound, the greek were the first who used letters for vowels, so they were looking for phoenician letters which they could turn into vowels. this letter "he" was a good opportunity to do so, because the phoenicians had another letter "heth" with a very similar [h] sound (see the "h" cave later in this series), so the greek decided that one [h] sound was enough for their language and turned this "he" letter into the vowel "epsilon".  
  
| no remarkable further changes by the etruscians and romans later.  
  
summary: the letter "e" is the upper part of a human in jubilation pose, rotated by 90 degrees clockwise! the middle horizontal line is the neck and head, the other two lines are the arms! :d  
  
cave difficulty: 4/10