Ę

Latin letter E with ogonek

Ę (minuscule: ę; Polish: e z 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 [ẽ]. In Latin, Irish, and Old Norse palaeography, it is known as e caudata ('tailed e').

In Polish

In Polish, ę comes after e in the alphabet. It never appears word-initially, except for the word ęsi. It is pronounced /ɛŋ/, /ɛn/, /ɛm/, /ɛɲ/ or /ɛ/, depending on the environment.

Unlike in French, Polish nasal vowels are "asynchronous": pronounced as an oral vowel + a nasal consonant. For the sake of simplicity, the ę vowel is sometimes transcribed /ɛ̃/.

The usual pronunciation of the letter is /ɛŋ/, pronounced [ɛŋ], except before f, w, s, z, sz and ż/rz, where it is pronounced as [ɛw̃]:

• język ('language', 'tongue'), pronounced [ˈjɛw̃zɘ̟k]
• mięso ('meat'), [ˈmjɛw̃sɔ]
• ciężki ('heavy'), [ˈt͡ɕɛw̃ʂki]
• męka ('torment'), [ˈmɛŋkä]

Before all stops and affricates, the pronunciation changes, with /ɛn/ before t and d and /ɛm/ before p and b. Before alveolo-palatal fricatives ś, ć, ź and dź it is pronounced /ɛɲ/ ([ɛj͂]). For example:

• więcej ('more'), pronounced [ˈvjɛnt͡sɛj]
• sędzia ('judge', 'referee'), [ˈsɛj͂d͡ʑä]
• głęboki ('deep'), [ɡwɛmˈbɔki]
• więzi ('bonds'), [ˈvjɛj͂ʑi]

If ę is the final letter of a word or followed by either l or ł, Poles will usually pronounce it as /ɛ/. For example, będę ('I will be') is pronounced [ˈbɛn̪d̪ɛ] and dziękuję ('thank you') is pronounced [dʑɛŋˈkujɛ]. The /ɛŋ/ at the end of a word is still used by a minority of Polish speakers, but is usually considered hypercorrect. Some speakers might also use the nasal pronunciation spontaneously.

In dialects of some regions, ę in final position is also pronounced as /ɛm/ so robię is occasionally pronounced as /ˈrɔbjɛm/. That nonstandard form is used by the former Polish president Lech Wałęsa. Some of his sentences that were respelled to reflect the pronunciation, e.g., 'Nie chcem, ale muszem' (properly written 'Nie chcę, ale muszę'; 'I don't want to, but I have to') have entered popular language.

Origin of the symbol

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 /ɛ̃/ 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.

History of the vowel

Polish ę 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:

Evolution

Early Proto-Slavic	*em/*en and *am/*an
Late Proto-Slavic	/ẽ/ and /õ/, transcribed by ⟨ę⟩ and ⟨ǫ⟩
Medieval Polish	short and long /ã/, written approximately ⟨ø⟩
Modern Polish	short /ã/ → /ɛŋ/, /ɛn/, /ɛm/, written ⟨ę⟩ long /ã/ → /ɔŋ/, /ɔn/, /ɔm/, written ⟨ą⟩

Alternations

It often alternates with ą:

• 'husband': mąż → mężowie ('husbands'),
• 'error': błąd → błędy ('errors'),
• 'pigeon': gołąb → gołębie ('pigeons')
• 'oak' in nominative: dąb → dębem (instrumental)
• 'hands' in nominative: ręce → rąk (genitive)
• 'five': pięć → piąty ('fifth')

Audio examples

• ('snakes')
• ('sound')
• ('I will be')

In Lithuanian

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 [eː], as in kęsti (to suffer) - 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 eglę, accusative of eglė (spruce). It is also used to change past tense verb to the participle in the past, e.g., tempė to tempęs - somebody who has pulled.

In some cases, ą, ę and į (but never ė) may be used for different forms, as in tąsa (extension) - tęsia (extends) - tįsoti (to lie extended). Finally, some verbs have the letter in the middle of the word only in the present tense, e.g., gęsta ([fire, light] is going off) but not užgeso (went off).

Unlike with į or ą, no Lithuanian word is known to start with ę.

Computer use

Character information

Preview	Ę		ę
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH OGONEK		LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH OGONEK
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	280	U+0118	281	U+0119
UTF-8	196 152	C4 98	196 153	C4 99
Numeric character reference	Ę	Ę	ę	ę
Named character reference	Ę		ę
ISO 8859-2 / ISO 8859-4	202	CA	234	EA
ISO 8859-10	221	DD	253	FD

See also

• Ą
• Polish phonology
• Polish alphabet
• Lithuanian orthography
• Ogonek
• Yus