Э э (Э э; italics: Э э; also known as backwards ye, from Russian , ye oborótnoye, ) is a letter found in three Slavic languages: Russian, Belarusian, and West Polesian. It represents the vowels and , as the e in the word "editor". In other Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic script, the sounds are represented by Ye (Е е), which represents in Russian and Belarusian in initial and postvocalic position or and palatalizes the preceding consonant. This letter closely resembles and should not be confused with the older Cyrillic letter Ukrainian Ye (Є є), of which Э is a reversed version. In Cyrillic Moldovan, which was used in the Moldovan SSR during the Soviet Union and is still used in Transnistria, the letter corresponds to ă in the Latin Romanian alphabet, and the phoneme [ə]. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian and many Uralic, Caucasian and Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union. Origin 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 (uniotated) . According to Yefim Karskiy, "Western Russian ustav knows , e.g. in Miscellany of the 15th c. from the Public Library (manuscr. #391) ( etc.), chronicles of 15th-16th cc., Miscellany of Poznań (16th c.), 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 (Etymologia), 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 (beside ) for modern Russian , 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