Editing Epsilon (section)

===Sound value===
The initial sound value of Ε was determined by the vowel occurring in the Phoenician letter name ''He'', which made it a natural choice for being reinterpreted from a consonant symbol to a vowel symbol denoting an [e] sound.<sup>[4]</sup> Besides its classical Greek sound value, the short /e/ phoneme, it could initially also be used for other [e]-like sounds. For instance, in early [[Attic Greek|Attic]] before c.500 B.C., it was used also both for the long, [[open-mid vowel|open]] /ɛː/, and for the long [[close-mid vowel|close]] /eː/. In the former role, it was later replaced in the classic Greek alphabet by [[Eta]] (Η), which was taken over from eastern [[Ionic Greek|Ionic]] alphabets, while in the latter role it was replaced by the [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]] spelling ΕΙ.