Talk:Silent e

A fact from Silent e appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 May 2005. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that silent E is a convention in English spelling added to the ends of words, that makes short vowels long?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2005/May.

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Requested move 21 July 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. -- Tavix ^(talk) 16:23, 28 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Silent e → magic e – Better title. The "e" in words like "hope", "came", "lime" etc. is not really silent. It modifies the sound of the previous vowel. Fish567 (talk) 03:14, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any evidence thst this is better known as magic e?--174.91.187.80 (talk) 05:14, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I would be opposed to the change, unless good evidence can be provided. Doing superficial searches of Google Books/Scholar, I find "silent e" to be a much more common term for the phenomenon. (It's not really magic either, so the argument given by the proposer doesn't hold much water.) W. P. Uzer (talk) 06:50, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, per WP:CONSISTENCY with Silent k, Silent letter, and Silent English alphabet. As far as I can tell 'magic k' is a term used almost exclusively to teach young children. Whereas academic literature and literature explaining phonotactics/phonetics to older children/adults tends to use 'silent e'. Plus if you look in the archive there are examples of 'truly' silent e's such as in the word come which wouldn't techncially be covered by an article entitled 'magic e'. Ebonelm (talk) 14:54, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - "silent x" is more commonly known than "magic x". –Davey2010^Talk 14:10, 22 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Strong oppose. There is no reason to move this article when the E itself isn't pronounced anyway. The term "magic e" is not used in teaching the English language, except to young children, whereas "silent e" is. ONR (talk) 00:07, 27 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose – Sounds silly. — JFG ^talk 08:07, 28 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

History

The article claims that phonological vowel length was lost in Middle English, which is of course complete nonsense. The author clearly completely misunderstood open syllable lengthening. Middle English was full of long vowels in closed syllables (līf, knīf, bọ̄k, chīld etc. etc. off the top of my head), and even short vowels in open syllables appear to have always existed.

And in general, the section is completely unsourced. There is plenty of literature on Middle English historical phonology. 88.81.51.28 (talk) 06:57, 11 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]