English Language & Usage Asked on August 20, 2021
It is well known that the letter E is the most common letter. In my corpus, I found 12.478% of letters is letter E. What makes me surprise was 64.219% of words contain the letter E. I also found that 12.384% of words end with a silent E.
Then I wonder why is the letter E so common in English spelling? Is it because of the silent E to some extent?
There are possibly different reasons why e is the most common letter in English spelling, here are a few:
French words or words that come from Latin also have the “e” as one of the letters that is cost commonly used. English is full of these words. “
—Irene Smith, B.A. Linguistics & Literature, The University of British Columbia; Answered January 12, 2019
One major contribution comes from the purely orthographical practice of adding a silent ‘e’ at the end of a word to mark its root vowel as “long”, regardless of its actual quality. Another is the high frequency of the article ‘the’ and the suffixes ‘-es’ and ‘-ed’. However, ‘e’ was already the most frequent letter in Old English which was written with a more one-to-one relationship between sounds and letters, and did not have equally “monotonous” grammatical elements.
—Tor Gjerde, Cand. Scient. Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (1997); Answered January 13, 2019
(Quora.com)
Answered by user 66974 on August 20, 2021
While this doesn't speak to the etymological reasons for why 'e' specifically is the most frequent letter, there is actually a very interesting statistical reason that there is such a letter: Zipf's law.
Given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table.
Zipf's law was originally discovered with regards to Word frequency (e.g. the word 'The' is the most common word in the Brown Corpus), but also applies to many frequency and ranking comparisons, especially where humans are involved in the ranking process.
Essentially, the easiest to recognize, most generally useful sounds and concepts are used more often while the more specific, harder to articulate sounds and concepts are used less often. This generally follows a "long tail" logarithmic curve.
As for the letter 'e', it often represents very easy to pronounce vowels, and orthographically it is also used in English orthography to "silently" affect another vowel (e.g. 'ate' vs. 'at'). Added up, it's a pretty useful little letter!
Answered by UnderSampled on August 20, 2021
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