Alphabetical by Michael Rosen Page A

with the ‘short e’ – apart from in New Zealand.
    We have several ways of getting it to signify the long ‘e’ – doubling it in ‘feet’, adding ‘a’ in ‘seat’, putting another kind of ‘e’ one consonant later as in ‘discrete’ and ‘Pete’. The one-consonant trick used to be called ‘the silent e’ or even ‘the magic e’. This was to ‘explain’ to children that ‘hat’ turned to ‘hate’ by magic. Present-day wisdom tries to show that the ‘a’ in ‘hate’ is made by both the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ one consonant later.
    The history of this represents one of many efforts to make sense of English spelling. Some Old English words had a final ‘e’ that was sounded as a ‘schwa’ sound, as with ‘name’, pronounced as Germans do today ‘nah-mer’ (but without the ‘r’ being voiced). However, when ‘wif’ acquired its ‘long i’ as we say it today, the spelling reformers of the seventeenth century decided that long vowel sounds, like ‘ay’, ‘ee’, ‘i’ (as in ‘I’ on its own), ‘o’ (sounding like ‘owe’) and ‘u’ (sounding like ‘you’), should have an ‘e’ on the end of the word to tell readers what to do, thus: ‘same’, ‘Pete’, ‘wife’, ‘gnome’ and ‘plume’. All well and good, but there are some words ending with ‘e’ where the ‘e’ doesn’t do this kind of work for us: like ‘some’, ‘have’, ‘shove’ or ‘gone’. Loan words like ‘cafe’ (which has mostly dropped its French accent over the ‘e’) are a rule unto themselves.
    Spelling reformers would have us adopting double-vowel letters: one long, one short, then all these complicationscould be stamped out. It would up the alphabet to thirty-one letters by adding a long ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ but would simplify spelling by miles. If for a moment we imagined that the long vowels were ‘aA’, ‘eE’, ‘iI’, ‘oO’ and ‘uU’, we could write, ‘MiI wiIf and iI lov eEting a niIc hot meEl at middaA.’ NeEt, eh?
    The little ‘eh?’ sound is extremely useful, as it gives us a way of asking questions in different ways depending on the tone of the ‘eh?’ It can be inviting, contemptuous, rhetorical, all-knowing, wink-winking and so on.
    â€˜Eeee’ can mean excitement or fear or a mock-version of both. ‘Eek’ is even more jokey. A Jamaican singer in the 1970s called himself ‘Eek-a-mouse’. One girls’ skipping song begins: ‘Eevy-ivy-over’.
    For ‘er’ see ‘ R ’.

e IS FOR e. e. cummings
    I N ABOUT 1960, my father showed me some poems by e. e. cummings. (Note: not E. E. Cummings.) For a while, I felt dislocated, at a loose end. The point about our conventions of print are that they tell you where you are, without telling you. That simple little duo, the full stop and capital letter, not only tells us of initials, abbreviations and the beginning and end of sentences. Since their invention, they have been part of how we have invented continuous prose. In the history of writing as a whole, they are relative newcomers and their arrival was slow and inconsistent.
    Using capital letters to begin things started out as early as the fourth century where they were used at the start of a page. Take a look at the illuminated manuscripts in the great national libraries and you’ll see that the scribes must have taken many hours creating these staggeringly ornate openers. By the fourteenth century, many scribes were using capitals to begin sentences, so by the time printing began with Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the