Re: Silent E

Quoting Colin Halverson <CHalvrson@...>:

> Do any other languages (I am sure there are at least a few) have a
> silent letter or especially a silent modifying letter (as in English "ate",
> the e is  silent and makes the a long)???
German's orthography is fairly consistently phonemic, but there
are a few exceptions.  Because Standard German does not have
geminate consonants, a pair like "Nachttisch" (nightstand)
and "nachtisch" (nightly) are homophonous, the second <t> in
<Nachttisch> not being pronounced.

> Where does this come from??
Originally, those silent <e>'s were pronounced, and in Middle
English sounded like the last <a> in <banana>.  This schwa in
turn derives from a variety of Old English vowels.

> Do any of ur conlangs have this??
Degaspregos's orthography is basically phonemic.  I never got
far enough to begin working on the actual phonetic realizations
that these phonemes were supposed to have, partly because I naively
thought that I wanted to convince more people to speak it by giving
a certain laxity to its pronunciation.  Phaleran, on the other hand,
is written in a different script; the Latin alphabet used in
posts to the list is used purely for practical reasons as
transliteration. I haven't actually worked out what that script is
yet, but once I work out the protolanguage, Tlaspi, and its script,
then I'll create a script for Phaleran which emphasizes learnéd
spellings, which will make it much like English in its obscurity.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III

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