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Historically, following the French usage, it was the practice to add a silent e at the end of words for aesthetic purposes. For example, words ending in -le (as in subtle and table) as well as following an s (such as house and tense, etc) have a redundant silent e .
In Irish, ea represents /a/ between a slender and a broad consonant. In Scottish Gaelic, ea represents /ʲa/, /ɛ/ or /e/ between a slender and a broad context, depending on context or dialect. In Old English, it represents the diphthong /æɑ̯/. Ea is also the transliteration of the ᛠ rune of the Anglo-Frisian Futhorc.
In other foreign words, however, the e after i may be pronounced (e.g., Ambiente, Hygiene, Klient), or names like Daniela, Gabriel, and Triest. Words ending in -ie can be particularly tricky to learners: There are generally two possibilities: When the final ie is stressed, it represents long /iː/ as in Zeremonie /tseʁemoˈniː/.
Palatal ċe, ġe arose regularly in non-West Saxon dialects in words containing the i-umlaut of ea (e.g. Mercian ċele, Mercian ġerwan, Kentish ġēman = Early West Saxon ċiele, ġierwan, ġīeman) [73] and can be found in Late West Saxon texts, which show (somewhat inconsistent) "smoothing" of Early West Saxon ē̆a to ē̆ after a palatal ...
The words that were affected include several ending in d, such as bread, head, spread, and various others, including breath, weather, and threat. For example, bread was /brɛːd/ in earlier Middle English but came to be shortened and to be rhymed with bed.
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.
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.
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.