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Although no manuscript exists in Chaucer's own hand, two were copied around the time of his death by Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe with whom he seems to have worked closely before, giving a high degree of confidence that Chaucer himself wrote the Tales.^[7] Chaucer's generation of English-speakers was among the last to pronounce e at the end of words (so for Chaucer the word "care" was pronounced [ˈkaːrə], not /ˈkɛər/ as in modern English). This meant that later copyists tended to be inconsistent in their copying of final -e and this for many years gave scholars the impression that Chaucer himself was inconsistent in using it.^[8] It has now been established, however, that -e was an important part of Chaucer's morphology (having a role in distinguishing, for example, singular adjectives from plural and subjunctive verbs from indicative).^[9] The pronunciation of Chaucer's writing otherwise differs most prominently from Modern English in that his language had not undergone the Great Vowel Shift: pronouncing Chaucer's vowels as they would be pronounced today in European languages like Italian, Spanish or German generally produces pronunciations more like Chaucer's own than Modern English pronunciation would. In addition, sounds now written in English but not pronounced were still pronounced by Chaucer: the word <knight> for Chaucer was [kniçt], not [naɪt]. The pronunciation of Chaucer's poetry can now be reconstructed fairly confidently through detailed philological research; the following gives an IPA reconstruction of the opening lines of The Merchant's Prologue; it is likely, moreover, that when a word ending in a vowel was followed by a word beginning in a vowel, the two vowels were elided into one syllable, as seen here (with care and...):