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E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is e (pronounced / ˈ iː / ); plural es , Es , or E's .
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long ...
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 pronounced [biːdə], had one stressed, open, long syllable. On the other hand, the word bid, although stressed, had a short vowel: [bid].
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.
Middle English /ɛː/ was shortened in certain words. Both long and short forms of such words often existed alongside each other during Middle English. In Modern English, the short form has generally become standard, but the spelling ea reflects the formerly-longer pronunciation. [1]
Tensing of short e [ɛ] to [e] Former long i [ɛi] becomes [ai] Fronting and raising of short a [a], long a [aː], and long e [eː] to [æ] [eː] [iː], creating the new contrasts: a [æ]: [eː], e [e]: [iː], i [ɪ]: [ai], o [ɒ]: [oː] Beginning of vowel reductions to [ə]. Short e, i and u before R; i.e. [ɛɹ], [ɪɹ] and [ʌɹ] are all ...
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The Great Vowel Shift was a series of chain shifts that affected historical long vowels but left short vowels largely alone. It is one of the primary causes of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling. The shortening of ante-penultimate syllables in Middle English created many long–short pairs. The result can be seen in such words as,