Talk:mute e

There are a couple of slightly tricky points here.

First, as far as I can tell, "silent e" and "mute e" are so nearly synonymous that they could almost be considered alternate spellings. This almost never happens. Most of the time, two terms are interchangeable (either within or across regional dialects) in some senses but not all. Ideally, both "silent e" and "mute e" would direct to the same page, with both forms shown. We do this with variants in hyphenation, for example, but on the other hand we famously don't do it for color/colour.

So I suppose the least controversial way out here is to have duplicate pages for the two forms.

Second, I'm not sure I would (or wouldn't) categorize this as "gramar". To me it's "orthography", and even if you consider orthography to be a sub-category of grammar, we should categorize by the most precise category.

Third, the spelling rule given is the one I learned as well (I think), but it's evidently not universally observed. E.g., I caught the BBC in the act of using "argueing" instead of "arguing". On the other hand, a couple of spot checks with google indicate that this spelling and similar ones are less than 1% as prevalent as the usual spelling. That's good enough for me, but not for some people. Does the BBC example trump prevalence, or do we (sensibly) consider it a typo?

Fourth, the note should be in separate section, but what to call it? It's not a usage note, as it doesn't pertain to the usage of the term "mute e" (e.g. "Never say 'mute e' in polite company"). Judging by recent activity on RFD, material like this has no place in a respectable dictionary such as Wiktionary anyway, so perhaps we should just remove it :-) -dmh 09:39, 14 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I can't make a lot of sense of the above discussion. Maybe I'm not properly awake yet. Just wanted to mention that in French e muet and in Dutch doffe e don't mean an e that is not pronounced. Instead they stand for /ə/. The sound of Dutch, template, endeavour, programmer. If English defines mute e differently, then how is this schwa sound called?
 * Of course I also want to mention that it is not wise to duplicate information. It won't stay in synch. Even when a reminder to also update the mirror entry is present.
 * If however, we decide that we want to duplicate anyway, against common sense and to save our readers the click of a button, I will refrain from commenting on the issue anymore. Polyglot 06:51, 15 September 2005 (UTC)