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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.
ea is used in many languages. In English, ea usually represents the monophthong /iː/ as in meat; due to a sound change that happened in Middle English, it also often represents the vowel /ɛ/ as in sweat. Rare pronunciations occur, like /eɪ/ in break, great, steak, and yea, and /ɔː/ in the archaic ealdorman.
Another example includes words like mean / ˈ m iː n / and meant / ˈ m ɛ n t /, where ea is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to the single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form.
Until the 17th century, words like happy could end with the vowel of my (originally [iː], but it was diphthongised in the Great Vowel Shift), which alternated with a short i sound. (Many words spelt -ee , -ea , -ey once had the vowel of day ; there is still alternation between that vowel and the happy vowel in words such as Sunday and Monday ...
Words ending in vowels would elide with the following word if it started with a vowel or h; words ending with -m would also be elided in the same way (this is called ecthlipsis). [19] [20] In writing, unlike in Greek, this would not be shown, with the normal spelling of the word represented.
Diagram of the changes in English vowels during the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s [1] (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English.
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Æ in Helvetica and Bodoni Æ alone and in context. Æ (lowercase: æ) is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae.It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.