Elbasan letter E

It is a vowel letter in the historic Elbasan alphabet.

The alphabet was created around 1750 for an Albanian Gospel manuscript; the surviving manuscript is dated 1761. As of 2026, the Unicode Standard describes it as the only known example of the script.

Elbasan is written left to right without ligatures, so one letter cannot decode a whole word. In a message, a lone 𐔈 is best read as a historical-script sample unless surrounding letters provide more.

Why was the Elbasan alphabet made?

It gave an Albanian Gospel translation its own alphabet.

The Unicode encoding proposal places Elbasan among original alphabets developed by central Albanian Christians between 1750 and 1850. It describes literacy in a region shaped by Greek, Cyrillic, and Ottoman Arabic-Persian writing traditions, and calls Elbasan the earliest and best adapted of that group.

The proposal maps Elbasan E to modern Albanian ë and EI to modern e. The letter names therefore do not follow the familiar Latin-letter pattern.

Which other Albanian scripts share this history?

Todhri and Vithkuqi belong to the same wider history of Albanian script-making.

Todhri was another historical Albanian script used in the Elbasan region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vithkuqi arose between 1824 and 1845.

They are separate scripts, not alternate names or forms of 𐔈.