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In English orthography, many words feature a silent e (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English .
In the cases of maté from Spanish mate (/ ˈ m ɑː t eɪ /; Spanish:), animé from Japanese anime, and latté or even lattè from Italian latte (/ ˈ l ɑː t eɪ /; Italian pronunciation: ⓘ), an accent on the final e indicates that the word is pronounced with / eɪ / ⓘ at the end, rather than the e being silent.
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk, half, calf, etc., the w in two and sword, gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though, daughter, night, brought, and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
e and i in separate segments (and often separate syllables or morphemes) Prefixes de-or re-before words starting with i (deindustrialize, reignite, etc.) Inflection -ing of those verbs with roots ending in -e that do not drop the e (being, seeing, swingeing, etc.) Others: albeit, atheism, cuneiform*, deify*, deity*, herein, nuclei, onomatopoeia
A heavy syllable is generally one with a branching rime, i.e. it is either a closed syllable that ends in a consonant, or a syllable with a branching nucleus, i.e. a long vowel or diphthong. The name is a metaphor, based on the nucleus or coda having lines that branch in a tree diagram.
The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables. For example, in the spelling "coöperate", the diaeresis reminds the reader that the word has four syllables, co-op-er-ate, not three, *coop-er-ate.
As the "diaeresis" diacritic, it is used to mark the separation of two distinct vowels in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis (or hiatus) occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong. For example, in the obsolete spelling "coöperate", the diaeresis reminded the reader that the word has four syllables co-op-er-ate, not ...
In words of two syllables, stress falls on the first syllable of the word (the penult, or second from the end): e.g., bó.nus, cír.cus. In words of three or more syllables, stress falls either on the penult or the antepenult (third from the end), according to these criteria: