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In English orthography, many words feature a silent ''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. In a large class of words, as a consequence of a series of historical sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift affecting long vowels, the former presence of the vowel sound represented by the ''e'' left its mark in the form of a change in the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. This can be seen in words such as ''rid'' and ''ride'' , in which the presence of the final, unpronounced ''e'' appears to alter the sound of the preceding ''i''. A silent ''e'' which has this effect is sometimes called a magic ''e''. The normal effect is to convert a short vowel sound to a long one, but because of the complications of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowel is not simply a lengthened version of the corresponding short one, and in most cases (as in the example of ''ride'') is in fact a diphthong. This vowel-altering effect of silent ''e'' has developed into a spelling convention, which may be put to use in new words (such as ''bike'') in which there is no historical reason for the presence of the ''e'' other than the need to mark the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. ==Effect of silent ''e'' on simple vowels== When silent ''e'' occurs at the end of an English word, it usually converts a preceding vowel to its "long" equivalent, which means that it makes a vowel "say its name" (except in the case of ''y'', which has the same pronunciation as ''i'' – compare ''byte/bite''). (The /j/ sound at the start of the pronunciation of ''u'' is omitted after certain consonants, as in ''rune'' and ''lute'' .) Depending on dialect, English has anywhere from 13 to more than 20 separate vowel sounds (both monophthongs and diphthongs). Silent ''e'' is one of the ways English spelling is able to use the Latin alphabet's five vowel characters to represent so many vowels. There is usually only one consonant between the silent ''e'' and the preceding vowel; a double consonant may be a cue that the ''e'' is not silent and does not affect the preceding vowel (as in ''Jesse'' and ''posse''). Traditionally, the vowels (as in ''bāit bēat bītɇ bōat būtɇ'') are said to be the "long" counterparts of the vowels (as in ''băt bĕt bĭt bŏt bŭt'') which are said to be "short". This terminology reflects the historical pronunciation and development of those vowels; as a phonetic description of their current values, it is no longer accurate. The values of the vowels these sounds are written with used to be similar to the values those letters had in French or Italian. The change is due to the effects of the Great Vowel Shift that marked the end of Middle English and the beginning of Early Modern English. The vowel shift gave current English "long vowels" values that differ markedly from the "short vowels" that they relate to in writing. Since English has a literary tradition that goes back into the Middle English period, written English continues to use Middle English writing conventions to mark distinctions that had been reordered by the chain shift of the long vowels. (The pronunciation of ''u'' before silent ''e'', found mainly in borrowings from French and Latin, is a consequence not of the Great Vowel Shift, but of a different series of changes.) When final ''e'' is ''not'' silent, this may be indicated in some way English spelling. This is usually done via doubling (''employee'': this word has ''employe'' as an obsolete spelling). Non-silent ''e'' can also be indicated by a diacritical mark, such as a grave accent (''learnèd'') or a diaeresis (''learnëd, Brontë''). Other diacritical marks can appear in foreign words (''résumé'', ''café''). These diacritics are frequently omitted, however. Some foreign words are always written without indicating that the ''e'' is non-silent (e.g. ''pace'', from Latin, meaning "with due respect to"). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Silent e」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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