Talk:E caudata

E caudata
There seems to be some confusion as to whether e caudata has an ogonek or a cedilla. It could be the result of some people not knowing how to tell the two diacritics apart, or it could be genuine variation in the way e caudata was drawn. It might be better to split it into a separate e caudata page if more info is gotten. --Ptcamn 14:06, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

ę vs æ
æ is the ligature of "a" + "e". In old Gaelic literature ę is the ligature of "e" (regular letter) + "a" (subscript) making it's closer meaning to "ea" instead of "ae". See A. G. van Hamel Foundation for Celtic Studies discussion on this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:647:4201:4BF0:6458:9363:DD0:3096 (talk) 23:43, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Latest Ę merge proposal
If there is to be further discussion of this (it was discussed previously at Talk:Ogonek, let's have it at Talk:Ę. Wareh (talk) 15:14, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Chronology
I think there is a serious error here. "As early as the twelfth century"? Let me quote from Bischoff (Latin Palaeography, Cambridge, 1990, p. 122):

The e caudata...which is very frequent even in pre-carolingian times for the diphthong ae, replaces the latter more and more in the tenth and eleventh centuries; the result is an uncertainty as to where ae should rightly be used and where not...In the twelfth century simple e replaces the [e caudata].

Mjhrynick (talk) 00:03, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

In further evidence that the article as it stands is in substantial error, let me point to a facsimile in Battelli (Lezioni di Paleografia, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999, p. 116), in which an e caudata appears in a manuscript ascribed to the VIIIth-IXth century.

I propose replacing this:

was used in Latin from as early as the twelfth century to represent the vowel also written ae or æ.

with this:

was sometimes used in medieval Latin to represent the diphthong classically represented as ae; by late-medieval times the tail was generally omitted, and a plain e used.

perhaps followed by this:

These orthographic changes were paralleled in the pronunciation-- at some point the classical diphthong seems to have "collapsed" to a sound virtually indistinguishable from that of a long Latin e.

Mjhrynick (talk) 00:39, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Old Norse tailed e
Since someone has asked for verification of what I wrote about e caudata in Old Norse, I need to explain that I have no source saying that Old Norse /e/ and /æ/ merged in pronunciation during the language's history, or that e caudata always represents umlaut of a, but I assume this because modern Icelandic writes /æ/ as /e/, and most examples of e caudata in Sweet's Icelandic Primer have a cognate with non-umlauted a. Therefore, I think my claims are fairly sound, but they would do well with official verification from a historical grammar. Erutuon (talk) 00:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)