At 5:39:30 AM on Saturday, May 17, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
> I noticed that English spelling conventions for long
> vowels using digraphs can be systematized this way:
> ie ue
> ee oo
> ea oa
> (a)
> which seems to reflect a system of long vowels
> i: u:
> e: o:
> E: O:
> (a)
> but aren't those conventions much younger?
This use of <ue> is probably better seen as a special case
of <u...e#>, as in <cute>; <i...e#> and <a...e#> are also
common (<pipe>, <gate>, etc.), and <e...e#> and <o...e#>
occur as well (<mete>, <delete>; <rote>, <vote>). This
convention of using final <e> to mark a long vowel developed
in the 15th century, and doubling to mark length (<ee>,
<oo>) is at least as old. The use of <ea> for ME /E:/ also
goes back to the 15th century and was well established by
the early 16th century, when <oa> for /O:/ was introduced by
analogy. The use of <ie> to represent ME /e:/ was a 15th
century borrowing from French and is found mostly but not
exclusively in words of French origin (<chief>, but also
<field>).
Brian