270px|thumb|Part of a Latin book published in Rome in 1632. E caudata is used in the words Sacrę, propagandę, prædictę, and grammaticę. The spelling grammaticæ, with æ, is also used.

The e caudata (, Latin for "tailed e", from — "tail"; sometimes also called the e cedilla, hooked e, or looped e) is a modified form of the letter E that is usually graphically represented in printed text as E with ogonek (ę) but has a distinct history of usage. It was used in Latin from as early as the sixth century

In Middle and Early Modern Irish manuscripts, and in unnormalised transcriptions of them, e caudata is used for e, ae, and ea.

In Old Norse manuscripts, e caudata was used for both short and long versions of . In a few texts in Old Norse, it represents short , the result of i-mutation of Proto-Germanic , and contrasts with e, which represents Proto-Germanic . However, because these two vowels eventually merged to in the written varieties of Old Norse, they are commonly both written as e.

Latin

thumb|Part of the [[Lindisfarne Gospels, written around 700. An e caudata with a loop-shaped diacritic is used in the first line: "reliquorum quę aliis." The ae is also written as two separate letters in the second-to-last line: "& singulis sua quaeq[ue]".]]

The use of the e caudata in medieval Latin manuscripts, like the use of the ligature æ, was a transitional stage in the gradual change from representing the diphthong ae with the separate letters ae, as it was written throughout antiquity, to representing it with the letter e. indeed, medieval scribes sometimes hypercorrected by representing with ae, æ, or ę what in classical Latin had been a monophthongal e. The e caudata was introduced on this basis by Coluccio Salutati and was used frequently in humanist minuscule and occasionally in Gothic script during the Renaissance.

References

  • CELT, a corpus of Celtic texts

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