'As the ancient Romans say...

'...festina lente', to quote Lord Snooty - or whatever his name* was - in Iolanthe. I've been toiling away at the vowel pairs starting with e for my book of lists. It is very slow going. But at least I have -eu- already done as part of the ELTON submission last year - my entry was short-listed and forms the basis of the book I'm working on at the moment. And e is the most common vowel, so I shouldn't expect too much.

Here's what I've got so far (as well as pages and pages of handwritten notes that are about to be exposed to my legendary typing skills - upwards of five words per minute):

Vowel sounds represented by the spelling 'EA'

There are 21 sounds represented by the pair -ea-, but three of these are part of the trigraph -eau- and are dealt with in the -au- section [x-refs tbs].

Of the remaining 18, /i:/ is by far the most common, with nearly twice as many representatives as its nearest rival, and those two together outnumber all the rest by a similar margin.

• /i;/
• /e/
• [16 more TBS]

As well as these sounds, there are words with one syllable ending in e and the next beginning with a. In these cases, the two vowels do not normally interact.  the e just works its magic on the preceding syllable...

And bridging between that G&S song I quoted at the outset and his big aria, Strephon accused, of 'attaining ['partaking'? 'a-taking'?] of his dolce far niente' [to rhyme with 'festina lente'] with Iolanthe, protests:

My Lords, of evidence I have no dearth 
She is - has been - my mother from my birth

That dearth is a representative of the '16 more TBS', which it's time I got back to.

* 'Tolloller', Wikipedia tells me. 'Earl Tolloller', it says, but one has to forgive Americans for not understanding titles.

 Update 15 November 2012 - trivial maths corrections (18-2=16).

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