When and how did we stop pronouncing the final ‘e’ in the vast majority of the words in our vocabulary? I’ve been thinking a lot about this; I’m pretty sure that every other Germanic language sounds out the final e (in German, the word ‘bitte’ is pronounced ‘bit-uh’, for example). Perhaps French had an influence on this (in which they seem to use three or four letters to represent one syllable), but this is just a wild guess on my part…
Or did we drop the final ‘e’ like we dropped þ and ð in the (1200s? 1300s? I’m unsure of the date…)?
I don’t think it’s a case of ceasing to pronounce the final E. The letter is there as a pronunciation guide. There’s a general rule in English that when a vowel is separated from another vowel by one letter or less, pronounce the first vowel as a long rather than short sound (it says it’s own name as we were taught in primary school). Hence the difference between tape and tap, tapper and taper or Od and ode. It works with any vowel anywhere in a word (hopping vs hoping) but e is simply the English default at the end of a word. Like all general rules in English it’s easy to find dozens of exceptions.
These E’s were never pronounced AFAIK. Itte was commonne at one time to put superfluouse silent letters, including E’s on the endes of wordes, but the practice has died out and relatively few survive. C combinations (ch, ck) seem to be the exceptions.
Can you actually think of any words where removing the silent E wouldn’t change the pronunciation? I can’t off the top of my head.
On this site I found this quote:
“When Chaucer died in 1400, people still pronounced the ‘e’ on the end of words. One hundred years later not only had it become silent but scholars were evidently unaware that it ever had been pronounced (…)”
de Lande, Manuel, 1997
A thousand years of non-linear history.
Zone Books, New York
And here I found this one:
A giant step toward standard spelling and usage was taken in 1582 with the publication of Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie, one of the earliest attempts to deal with the English language as it was actually spoken and written. Some of the spelling principles established by Mulcaster are these:
…Use a final silent e to mark long vowels and to distinguish them from short vowels (e.g., hop for the short vowel and hope for the long vowel). Mulcaster called this the qualifying E: “I call that E, qualifying, whose absence or presence, somtime altereth the vowel, somtime the consonant going next before it” (Campagnac, 1925, p. 123).
For more information, try a search on The Great Vowel Shift of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
As Peregrine indicated, the final e’s were pronounced until around 1500. The reason they’re associated with long vowels is that Middle English speakers got in the habit of lengthening vowels in “open” syllables, i.e. syllables that end in a vowel. So if you pronounce “pane” as pa-ne then the first syllable is open, but the word “pan” is a closed syllable because it ends with a consonant.
So the silent e seems like it’s just there as a pronunciation guide, but it was pronounced once. Gaspode is right that shortly after the e’s went silent, people started sticking them onto everything, but that practice was dropped with standardized spelling.
Unless you’re using a different phonetic alphabet than I am, or I’m really missing something, we still use the eth. It’s featured prominently in the word “there”. What’s the other one, though? I can’t remember at the moment.
I read that the final e in English words came from noun declensions, which are a part of Latin (and some other languages like Russian that had little influence on English). As English evolved away from declining nouns (thank God) and towards word order as a means of communicating case, which I understand is a common direction of evolution such that very old languages like English rely heavily on word order whereas newer languages like Latin rely heavily on word endings instead, the ‘e’ hung around but came to be ignored in pronunciations.
One problem with the above explanation: it only explains the ‘e’ on the ends of nouns. I wonder if nouns carry more than an even share of ‘e’ endings? There are plenty of verbs ending in ‘e’…
Peregrine pretty much has it nailed. We should also remember that a standard spelling derives largely from printing (in the manuscript era, a monk or other writer ws likely to spell an imperfectly familiar word as it sounded to him – and to hell with the other three million people in the kingdom), and that Caxton introduced printing into England during the latter part of the Great Vowel Shift (that change in pronunciation, mostly (but not entirely) due to the lifting of the tongue). As a result, the spelling of English words is a lot more medieval than their pronunciation (give the vowels a “continental” value, and pronounce final “e” as a schwa, and you’ll get something recognizable to Chaucer and Gower as an English dialect (albeit a weird and barbaric one)).
You’ve got a problem with declination? You decline nouns every day, and I’m not just talking about ‘he/him’. Every time you say something like “Let’s go to Ethel’s place”, you’re using the genitive form of ‘Ethel’. Just because you’re unfamiliar with a way of doing things doesn’t make it wrong, or even difficult. I’m sure a Latin speaker would have a hell of a problem using something as puerile as word order to decide what sense a noun has. Just ask a Romance-language speaker (French, Spanish etc.) how ugly English is with its almost total lack of verb conjugation.
And to my understanding, Russian has lost as much by way of noun-declension as English has. Lithuanian, on the other hand, still has pretty much the whole of the declension toolbox. But this is just vague memories from linguistics class.
You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘tomahto’. Word modification vs. word order is a constant shifting tapestry in the evolution of language. Take French as an example - two thousand years ago, French (or, as it was known then, Latin) was a very strongly declensional language. Five hundred years ago, it was very much a word-order language. The pendulum is swinging back, though. If you look at French as a spoken language, it is fairly declensional again, but with the modification coming at the beginning of the noun. For instance:
le-chat ‘the cat’ (nom./acc. sing.)
du-chat ‘of the cat’ (gen. sing.)
au-chat ‘to the cat(s)’ (dat. sing./pl.)
les-chat ‘the cats’ (nom./acc. pl.)
des-chat ‘of the cats’
etc.
As a speaker of French, I find this at least as natural as the system we use in English. They both have their plusses and minuses; if they didn’t, one form would win out in virtually every language. And it just isn’t that way.
Unfortunately, the silent ‘e’ has nothing to do with declension, and everything to do with the Great Vowel Shift.
If you want to learn more, go read up on your Tom Lehrer or your Mark Twain (or Akatsukami’s post).