is there a grammatical reason why a word such as noise loses the E when it is changed to noisy ?

Question

Other examples haze hazy..etc

Answer 1

Well the English language is full of contradictions and very few hard and fast rules. But one reason may be that the phonetic sound of the additional 'y' is the same sound that can be signified by an 'e' (although e can have other sounds as well).
So therefore in the case of haze/hazy there is no need to include an 'e' as well, where a 'y' is placed on the end of the word.

Answer 2

Well, there are historical and phonological reasons, if that's what you mean.

Actually, note that it NORMAL that a word with a 'silent e' at the end, when adding a suffix that begins with a vowel, will NOT keep the e

Examples:
* mode - modal
* amaze - amazing
* ignore - ignorant
* Dane - Danish
* decorate - decorator

For that matter, an e is 'lost' when you add endings beginnign with e: -ed, -er, -est
compare:
guide - guided with herd - herded
fine-finer-finest with tough-tougher-toughest

It's true that the form -y varies with -ey, though -ey is especially used after y (to avoid 'yy'), or a vowel (and many words can be written EITHER way) Examples: gooey, clayey


In fact, it's not exactly that the e is 'lost'. It's better to think of many of these final e's as remnants of an old ENDING, like those others that begins with a vowel (see above - ing, -est...). At one time in Old and Middle English, when there were still CASE endings in English, and those final e's --which were pronounced until Modern English-- once 'did' something. By the way, this has to do with why the preceding vowel was "long". It was normal for vowels in English to be 'long' when in an 'open syllable' (that is, one where the vowel is NOT followed by a consonant). Thus, the syllables of "cane" would be "ca -ne" (the final e being pronounce as an unaccented "uh" sound).

Now in Modern English those final, just slightly pronounced e's were dropped in pronunciation (became "silent"), but were retained in the spelling. At first this was sort of out of tradition (and because not all dialects of English had stopped pronouncing it yet). But it was found to be convenient to retain the letter to make clear that the preceding vowel was still "long", so even when some spelling changes WERE made to reflect how Modern English was pronounced, the now "silent" e was kept. And since the -e had NOT been there when other vowel-first endings were used, it typically still mostly isn't (except for some cases of "-ey").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_E#History

Answer 3

It's not grammatical,but it has to do with pronunciation.Now,without going through the trouble of giving all examples,it's suffice to say that most similarly spelt endings follow the same pattern,although for each example there are numerous exceptions.I say endings,rather than suffixes,because in this case it's not really a suffix.Anyway,I'm getting bored and this answer is in danger of turning into a book,so to cut it short,the answer is 'No'.

Answer 4

In the old days it was actually spelt noisey , but it was changed to the modern day spelling of NOISY. It looks better and makes more sense.NOSEY is very similar and it would have been very easy to muddle them up.

Answer 5

It's the same principle when fry becomes fries and try becomes tries, instead of frys and trys. Just the peculiarity of English I guess.