DZIGGETAI,. dzig'ge-ti, the native name for the Mongolian wild horse or wild ass (Asinus or Equus hemionus), also known as the Kiang (q.v.), and sometimes compounded with the Kulan (Equus or Asinus onager).
fifth letter of the English alphabet, as also of the alphabets of Greek and Latin, and of all the European lan guages except those which, as the Russian, use the Cyrillian alphabet, where the E has sixth place The character corre sponding to E in Hebrew and other Semitic languages, as Phoenician, Samaritan, Chaldzan, holds the same relative place in the alphabets of those languages. The form of the letter e in early Hebrew and early Phoenician was a and from that is derived the Greek E (epsilon), which is the Phoenician character reversed, with stem shortened and made perpendicular: this character represented in the Hebrew and other languages of western Asia, not the vowel sound E but the soft breathing. Taken into the Greek alphabet it was at first used to represent the vowel sound e whether short or long; but after ward the character H was employed in Greek for the long e and was called eta, while the E received the name epsilon. The Latins used the E for both the long and short vowel and adopted the H of the Greek alphabet to denote the aspirate. The name and sound of this letter in all European languages except English is eh, as in our interjection of inquiry: long e in those languages is invariably equal to a in mate, and short e equal to e in met: the long E of English is in those other languages expressed by the third vowel, I: thus, English he, me, lee, would in those languages be written phoneti cally hi, mi, li. In the standard alphabet em
ployed in linguistic science the vowels a, e, i, o, u, are taken to represent the sounds ah, eh, ee, oh and oo, and are named accordingly. The letter E occurs in English words far more fre quently than any other letter of the alphabet: compared with A, I, 0, U, its frequency of occurrence is as 1,000 to 728, 704, 672, 296 re spectively; compared with various other letters it is as 1,000 to 770 (t), 670 (n), 392 (d), 280 (c), 236 (f), 120 (b), 22 (z). In frequency of occurrence as an initial letter it ranks only as eleventh and is to T as 340 to 1,194. One reason of the greater frequency of E in general use is that it often takes the place, in modern English words, of the vowels a, o and u of Anglo-Saxon words; another reason is that final e is largely employed to lengthen the vowel of a preceding syllable, as in there, here, cape, pane: it is employed even where it serves no purpose of pronunciation at all, as in gone, live, give.
E as an abbreviation is used for East, editio, emeritus, and ergo ; e.g. and e.c. for exempli gratid, and exempli mica In music E is the third tone in the key of C. and the fifth semitone in the chromatic scale. Consult Soames, "Introduction to the Study of Phonetics,' and Sweet, (History of English Sounds.' See ALPHABET.