Use in English
⟨E⟩ is the most common (or highest frequency) letter in the English alphabet (starting off the typographer's phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU) and several other European languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression. This makes it a hard and popular letter to use when writing lipograms. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) is considered a "dreadful" novel, and that "at least part of Wright's narrative issues were caused by language limitations imposed by the lack of E." Both Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit ⟨e⟩ and are considered better works. Like other Latin vowels, ⟨e⟩ came in a long and a short variety. Originally, the only difference was in length but later on, short ⟨e⟩ represented /ɛ/.
In English, the salient phenomenon silent e's, although arising from old inflections that have been dropped, still retain a function as they indicate that certain vowels in the word are long vowels (for example rat has a short vowel and rate has a long one).
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Famous quotes containing the word english:
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)