Silent e

Silent e is a writing convention in English spelling. When reading, the silent letter e at the end of a word signals a specific pronunciation of the preceding vowel letter, as in the difference between "rid" /ɹɪd/ and "ride" /ɹaɪd/. This orthographic pattern followed the phonological changes of the Great Vowel Shift in late Middle English. Educators have erroneously described this difference with the terms "short vowel" and "long vowel," both borrowed from studies of the Great Vowel Shift, when vowel length was still a meaningful distinction. Analysis of common spellings and pronunciations shows that the "silent e" most often—but not without exceptions—signals a different phoneme than a word spelled without it.

Effect of silent e on simple vowels

Without silent e	With silent e	IPA transcription	Compare
mad	made	/mæd/ → /meɪd/	maid
bed	Bede	/bɛd/ → /biːd/	bead
bit	bite	/bɪt/ → /baɪt/	bight
bot	bote	/bɒt/ → /boʊt/	boat
but	butte	/bʌt/ → /bjuːt/	beaut
(see help:pronunciation for an explanation of the symbols used);

When silent e occurs in an English word, it converts a vowel to its "long" equivalent. If English were spelled with the traditional Romance language vowel values of the Latin alphabet, often these vowels would be written with another letter entirely. Moreover, alternatives exist in English for most spellings that use silent e. Depending on dialect, English has anywhere from thirteen to more than twenty separate vowel sounds (both monophthongs and diphthongs). Silent e is one of the ways English spelling is able to use the Latin alphabet's five vowel characters to represent so many vowels.

Traditionally, the vowels /ei iː ai ou juː/ (as in bait beet bite boat beauty) are said to be the "long" counterparts of the vowels /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ/ (as in bat bet bit bot but) which are said to be "short". This terminology reflects the historical pronunciation and development of those vowels; as a phonetic description of their current values, it is no longer accurate. The values of the vowels these sounds are written with used to be similar to the values those letters had in French or Italian. The traditional "long vowels" also closely correspond to the letter names those vowels bear in the English alphabet, and the letter name is usually an accurate guide to the value of the vowel that is affected by silent e.

This variety of vowels is due to the effects of the Great Vowel Shift that marked the end of Middle English and the beginning of Early Modern English. The vowel shift gave current English "long vowels" values that differ markedly from the "short vowels" that they relate to in writing. Since English has a literary tradition that goes back into the Middle English period, written English continues to use Middle English writing conventions to mark distinctions that had been reordered by the chain shift of the long vowels.

When final 'e' is not silent, this generally requires some sort of indication in English spelling. This is usually done via doubling (employee: this word has employe as an obsolete spelling). When the silent e becomes a part of an inflection, its non-silent status can be indicated by a number of diacritical marks, such as a grave accent (learnèd) or a diaeresis (learnëd, Brontë). Other diacritical marks can appear in foreign words (compare résumé with nativized resume).

The 'a' group

The sounds of the 'a' group are some of the more dialectically complex features of contemporary modern English; the sounds that can be represented in modern English by 'a' include /æ/, /ɑː/, and /ɔ/. See broad A and cot-caught merger for some of the cross-dialect complexities of the English 'a' group. The effect of silent e on English 'a' moves it towards /eɪ/.

The 'e' group

Silent e typically moves 'e' to /iː/. This change is generally consistent across all English dialects.

The 'i' group

For the "long vowel" represented in written English by 'i', the effect of silent e is to turn it into a diphthong /aɪ/. In some dialects, this diphthong is affected by the voiced or unvoiced quality of the following consonant so that it may be closer to [əɪ]; see Canadian raising.

The 'o' group

Short 'o', in contemporary English, tends to fall in with short 'a' and to share some of the complexities of that group; depending on dialect, the written short 'o' can represent /ɒ/, /ʌ/, and /ɑː/, as well as /ɔ/ and /oː/. The usual effect of silent e on written 'o' is to fix it as a long o sound. In several dialects of English, this long /oː/ is realized as a diphthong /oʊ/; and in some forms of southern British English, the leading element is centralized further, yielding /əʊ/. All of the sounds in the previous sentence are in free variation with one another.

The 'u' group

Silent e generally turns the sound written as 'u' to its corresponding long vowel /juː/, although there are exceptions depending on dialect (see yod-dropping). Initial long 'u' as in use is almost always subject to iotacism.

Silent e and consonants

Silent e also functions as a front vowel for purposes of representing the outcome in English of palatalized sounds. For example:

• Mac > mace (/mæk/ > /meɪs/)
• hug > huge (/hʌg/ > hjuːdʒ/)

where /s/ is the expected outcome of the ce digraph, and the g in huge is pronounced /dʒ/. Silent e is used in some words with 'dg' in which it does not lengthen a vowel: ridge, sedge, hodge-podge. Spelling such words with 'j', the other letter that indicates that sound, does not occur in native or nativized English words.

Truly silent e

In some common words that historically had long vowels, silent e no longer has its usual lengthening effect: come, done. This is especially common in some words that historically had 'f' instead of 'v', such as give and love; in Old English, /f/ became /v/ when it appeared between two vowels (OE giefan, lufu), while a geminated 'ff' lost its doubling to yield /f/ in that position. This also applies to a large class of words with the adjective suffix '-ive', such as captive, that originally had '-if' in French.

Some words loaned to English from French, such as promenade, remain pronounced in an approximation of their French original. In French there is an equivalent of this type of truly silent e, called e muet or e caduc; it has many rules as to when it really is sounded.[1]

Some English words vary their accented syllable based on whether they are used as nouns or as adjectives. In a few words such as minute, this may affect the operation of silent e: as an adjective, minúte has the usual value of 'u' followed by silent e, while as a noun mínute silent e does not operate. See initial-stress-derived noun for similar patterns that may give rise to exceptions.

History

Silent e, like many conventions of written language that no longer reflect current pronunciations, was not always silent. In Chaucer's Balade, the first line does not scan properly unless what appears to current eyes to be a silent e is pronounced:

Hyd, Absolon, thy giltè tresses clerè

Gilte ends in the same sound as modern English Malta, and clere sounds like the contemporary pronunciation of Clara. In Middle English, this final schwa had some grammatical significance, although that was mostly lost by Chaucer's time. It was elided regularly when a word beginning with a vowel came next. The consequences of silent e in contemporary spelling reflect the phonology of Middle English. In Middle English, as a consequence of the lax vowel rule shared by most Germanic languages, vowels were long when they historically occurred in stressed open syllables; they were short when they occurred in "checked," or closed syllables. Thus bide /'biːdə/ had a long vowel, while bid /bid/ had a short one.

The historical sequence went something like this:

• In Old English, a phonological distinction was made between long and short vowels.

• In Middle English, vowel length was lost as a phonological feature, but was still phonetically present. A word like bide, syllabified bi.de and phonetically [biːdə], had one stressed, open, long syllable. On the other hand, the word bid, although stressed, had a short vowel: [bid].

• At some point unknown to us, the phonetically long vowels began to diphthongize. This was the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Possibly at the same time, the short vowels were laxed. So as "bide" [biːdə] became [bɨidə], "bid" [bid] changed to [bɪd].

• At a later point, all word-final schwas were lost. The phonetic motivation for lengthening the vowel--the open syllable--was lost, but the process of diphthongization had already begun, and the vowels which had once been identical except for length were now phonetically dissimilar and phonologically distinct.

The writing convention of silent e marks the fact that different vowel qualities had become phonemic, and were preserved even when phonemic vowel length was lost.

Long vowels could arise by other mechanisms. One of these is known as "compensatory lengthening"; this occurred when consonants formerly present were lost: maid is the modern descendant of Old English mægde. In this example, the g actually became a glide /j/, so in a sense, the length of the consonant stayed where it always had been, and there was no "compensation." The silent e rule became available to represent long vowels in writing that arose from other sources; Old English brŷd, representing *bruʒd-i-, became Modern English bride.

The rules of current English spelling were first set forth by Richard Mulcaster in his 1582 publication Elementarie. Mulcaster called silent e "qualifying e", and wrote of it:

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 wold 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.

Mulcaster also formulated the rule that a double letter, when final, indicated a short vowel in English, while the absence of doubling and the presence of silent e made the vowel long. In modern English, this rule is most prominent in its effects on the written "a" series:

• gal, gall, gale (/gæl, /gɔːl/, /geɪl/).

Digraphs are sometimes treated as single letters for purposes of this rule:

• bath, bathe (/bæθ/, /beɪð/)

Cultural significance

Tom Lehrer wrote a song called Silent E for the children's television series The Electric Company in 1971. In it, he asks the musical questions:

Who can turn a can into a cane?
Who can turn a pan into a pane?
It's not too hard to see,
It's Silent E.

The superhero Letterman, also featured on The Electric Company, was described as being "stronger than silent e".

A series of similar songs about Magic E was featured in the British educational series Look and Read between 1974 and 1994, written by Roger Limb and Rosanna Hibbert and performed by Derek Griffiths.

In the children's show Between the Lions, there was an evil character called Silent E, who was featured in a musical animated sketch where he makes the vowel sounds say their names and changes the words without a silent e into words with a silent e. He is carted off to jail, but easily escapes by using either the policeman's pin and turning it into a pine to climb out the window or the policeman's cap and turning it into a cape to fly out the window. Either way, after that, the policeman shouted, "Well, Silent e, you may have slipped out of my grasp this time, but mark my words: I'll get you YET!"

Here Comes Silent E (ISBN 0375812334), published by Random House Books for Young Readers in 2004, features a character named Silent E who changes words around.

See also

• Silent letter

External links

• Early Modern English (PDF)
• Questions teachers ask about spelling by Shane Templeton and Darrell Morris (PDF)
• Elementarie by Richard Mulcaster
• Silent E, complete lyrics by Tom Lehrer
• Look and Read downloads, including a version of the Magic E song