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-UE
"The 'silent E' in English is useless and shouldn't be there".
I've heard many people voice this complaint, and I don't know why.
While it is true that English orthography (spelling) is bad and quite often nonsensical, the silent E does have an important purpose: it indicates that a vowel is long. Look at these word pairs: rat/rate, tub/tube, not/note, and mat/mate. In all of these, the ones with e's on the end have long vowels. This distiction is pretty ingrained into English speakers brains--most of us, when seeing a word with an "e" at the end, will not pronounce the "e" and make the first vowel of the word long.
The idea of a letter which only exists to change pronounciation (and isn't pronounced at all) isn't an English invention: Russian has two seperate letters for this: "Ъ", which tells the speaker not to palatazise the preceding consonant, and "Ь", which tells the speaker to slightly palatasize the preceding consonant.
With all of this, why do people think the silent e is useless?
Comments
like "nice".
It could easily be substituted with "ss", but that's orthographically wrong, even though it wouldn't change the pronunciation. Until the introduction of the new orthography rules there was no guideline to when "ß" and when "ss" is used, even though they could have just as well done away with this horribly pointless letter (some people even thought that they did, probably wishful thinking). And finally, it looks way to similar to a "B", confusing the hell out of non-native speakers.
Fuck ß.
That would be a good idea, but English has an extreme aversion to any kinds of diacritics.
Nyarly, You wanna know a useless letter?
" ï ". It appears in one one--ONE--word in the entire English Language. 99% of the time, it simply it substituted with "i". That is a useless letter, my friend.
It's actually supposed to be "Naïve".
Heh... MY language doesn't have shit like this
(Except "H". Talk about a useless letter)
Nick:"H" is silent in Spanish, right? Or is it like the English "H, which would be useless, given that "j" apparently already fills that role.
Speaking of, English is the only Indo-European language I've seen that has a hard "j". Every other Indo-European language says it as "h" or "y".
At least Spanish isn't like Basque, though (but that's grammar, not pronounciation or spelling).
And we sure do have a lot of language topics,do we?
What about French?
For comparison: Each verb in Spanish can be said (supposedly) in about 20 different ways.
Each verb in Basque, on the other hand, can be said around 42,380 ways.
Yeah.
By the way, many English verbs simply follow ablaut or the Germanic verb system. They aren't irregual, they simple follow a rule of the Germanic language family.