Silent e

In English orthography, many words feature a silent ⟨e⟩, (single, final, non-syllabic <e>) most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English.It altereth the sound of all the vowells, euen quite thorough one or mo consonants as, máde, stéme, éche, kínde, strípe, óre, cúre, tóste sound sharp with the qualifying E in their end: whereas, màd, stèm, èch, frind, strip, or, cut, tost, contract of tossed sound flat without the same E, And therefor the same loud and sharp sound in the word, calleth still for the qualifying e, in the end, as the flat and short nedeth it not. It qualifyeth no ending vowell, bycause it followeth none in the end, sauing i. as in daie, maie, saie, trewlie, safetie, where it maketh i, either not to be heard, or verie gentlie to be heard, which otherwise would sound loud and sharp, and must be expressed by y. as, deny, aby, ally. Which kinde of writing shalbe noted hereafter. It altereth also the force of, c, g, s, tho it sound not after them, as in hence, for that, which might sound henk, if anie word ended in c. in swinge differing from swing, in vse differing from vs. In English orthography, many words feature a silent ⟨e⟩, (single, final, non-syllabic <e>) most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English. In a large class of words, as a consequence of a series of historical sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift, the presence of a suffix on the end of a word influenced the development of the preceding vowel, and in a smaller number of cases it affected the pronunciation of a preceding consonant. When the inflection disappeared in speech, but remained as a historical remnant in the spelling, this silent ⟨e⟩ was reinterpreted synchronically as a marker of the surviving sounds. This can be seen in the vowels in word-pairs such as rid /rɪd/ and ride /raɪd/, in which the presence of the final, unpronounced ⟨e⟩ appears to alter the sound of the preceding ⟨i⟩. An example with consonants is the word-pair loath (loʊθ) and loathe (loʊð), where the ⟨e⟩ can be understood as a marker of a voiced ⟨th⟩. As a result of this reinterpretation, the ⟨e⟩ was added by analogy in Early Modern English to many words which had never had a pronounced ⟨e⟩-inflection, and it is used in modern neologisms such as bike, in which there is no historical reason for the presence of the ⟨e⟩ other than the need to mark the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. Although Modern English orthography is not entirely consistent here, the correlation is common enough to allow us to work with a rule-of-thumb to explain the spelling, especially in primary-school teaching, where a silent ⟨e⟩ which has this effect is sometimes called a magic ⟨e⟩. Structured Word Inquiry uses the term replaceable <e>. The normal effect is to convert a short vowel sound to a long one, but because of the complications of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowel is not simply a lengthened version of the corresponding short one, and in most cases (as in the example of ride) is in fact a diphthong. An ⟨e⟩ when associated with a preceding vowel usually converts the preceding “short vowel” to its 'long vowel' equivalent and is silent. In English, the 'letter name' of a vowel is its long vowel form (except in the case of ⟨y⟩, which has the same pronunciation as ⟨i⟩ – compare byte/bite). Depending on dialect, English has anywhere from 13 to more than 20 separate vowel phonemes, both monophthongs and diphthongs. Silent ⟨e⟩ is one of the ways English orthography is able to use the Latin alphabet's five vowel characters to represent so many vowel sounds. There is usually only one consonant between the silent ⟨e⟩ and the preceding vowel; a double consonant may be a cue that the ⟨e⟩ is not silent and does not affect the preceding vowel (as in Jesse and posse).