Talk:Silent E
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[edit] "Bad" and "bade"
I always thought "bad" and "bade" were pronounced identically. He bade him farewell. She forbade him to do x, y and z. It's the same, isn't it? jguk 19:28, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
- Bade, as the past tense of bid, can have either pronunciation according to the American Heritage Dictionary. -- Smerdis of Tlön 19:32, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
[edit] long vowels
Hmm, should we really say that "ei" is a long "a", as this is ambiguous and confusing. Is there a better way to describe the sound changes? Zeimusu | (Talk page) 14:23, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
The above is an important note. Since the description of "long vowel" and "short vowel" in English is a description of how things changed hundreds of years ago, it is useful primarily for people studying the linguistics of the Great Vowel Shift. Unfortunately, the terms "long vowel" and "short vowel" are probably used most commonly to try to -teach- people to speak and read English. The inaccuracy of the terms is confusing. I find it much more helpful when teaching readings to simply talk about what the letter or groups of letters 'say' rather than trying to give them a name: e.g., the "a" in apple says /ae/. Unfortunately, the terms are all too commonly used as if they are supposed to be helpful to 6-year-olds and others who are easily confused by jargon. Jerekson| (Talk page) 17:56, 21 Nov 2005
[edit] Compensatory lengthening
Is the compensatory lengthening account really correct? Consider the word bide. In Middle English, this was a disyllable, and I think since the first syllable was open, the i was already long, so the pronunciation was /bi:də/. In a word like bid, there was only one syllable, and since it was closed, the i was short, so the pronunciation was /bid/.
The point I'm trying to make is that the length distinction was already present in ME, before the final schwas dropped. In this view, no compensatory lengthening occurred.
I'm not sure which of these two accounts is most widely accepted. Can the author of the present wording give a citation? I think mine is Wyld's History of the Mother Tongue; but that's an old account and the conventional wisdom may have changed.
ACW 14:30, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
- I don't know who the author is, but the "compensatory lengthening" explanation, while conventional, does not appear to be correct. As ACW points out, the length was already there when the schwa elided, so there was no lengthening, compensatory or otherwise. These long vowels were then subject to (internal) dissimilation, ultimately resulting in the diphthongs we have now. Let's change the article. Squidley 15:43, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
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- I tend now to agree; compensatory lengthening usually occurred where consonants were lost, not final schwas. I have changed the article to include both explanations. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:52, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
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- Yeah, I like the new version better, though I believe it is not correct to say that the "g" of "maegde" was lost. Instead, it became a glide [j], just like the "g" of OE "daeg." This change of "g" to "j" ("i" or "y" if you prefer) is also found in modern Swedish.
- Incidentally, we were editing at the same time, and you finished first. I will modify my edit to fit with yours, and toss it in. I hope you like it. Squidley 16:18, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
- I've always found it somewhat remarkable that the Old English spelling system recognized that this glide was in fact originally /g/, and wrote it that way. In poetry, it alliterated with /g/; perhaps many traditional formulas would be broken if it stopped alliterating. Smerdis of Tlön 22:18, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Long and Short
The links in the very first paragraph of the article take us to an article on vowel length, which immediately contradicts the present article. It reads, "While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages..." This is true. The terms "long" and "short" have been used inaccurately in English reading education for decades. The fact is that the Silent E makes you say an entirely different phoneme, not a version of the phoneme longer in duration. There is nothing about the sound /ɪ/ as in "rid" that becomes 'longer' when we add a letter E to the spelling. Rather, the vowel sound is an entirely different phoneme, the diphthong /aɪ/--"ride." I would like to represent the common educational terms (short and long) as contradictory to the research available from linguistics, or correct them to match linguistics of English. Jerekson 06:15, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] IPA pronunciations
I don't know about you, but the IPA pronunciations on this page seem to me to be incorrect unless pronounced in a strong Northern English accent. Me, and everyone from my locale (London) pronounces "maid" and "made" as /mejd/ or perhaps /meid/ and "bight" and "bite" as /bajt/ or perhaps /bait/ - there's definitely no ɪ involved, and I'm pretty sure that's the case in American and all other major regional varieties of English. On the other hand, a Scouser...
[edit] capitalization
Why is e capitalized throughout the article, as if a proper noun? I believe the proper style would be italics. Potatoswatter 08:11, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
