/e/ (although final /i/ triggered metaphony before that, e.g. Spanish hice, Portuguese fiz "I did" < *fize < Latin fēcī). Conservative languages like Spanish largely maintain that system, but drop final /e/ after certain single consonants, e.g. /r/, /l/, /n/, /d/, /z/ (< palatalized c). The same situation happened in final /u/ that merged into /o/ in Spanish. In the Gallo-Romance languages (part of Western Romance), final /o/ and /e/ were dropped entirely unless that produced an impossible final cluster (e.g. /tr/), in which case a "prop vowel" /e/ was added. This left only two final vowels: /a/ and prop vowel /e/. Catalan preserves this system. Loss of final stressless vowels in Venetian shows a pattern intermediate between Central Italian and the Gallo-Italic branch, and the environments for vowel deletion vary considerably depending on the dialect. In the table above, final /e/ is uniformly absent in mar, absent in some dialects in part(e) /part(e)/ and set(e) /sɛt(e)/, but retained in mare (< Latin mātrem) as a relic of the earlier cluster *dr. In primitive Old French (one of the Gallo-Romance languages), these two remaining vowels merged into . Various later changes happened in individual languages, e.g.: In French, most final consonants were dropped, and then final was also dropped. The is still preserved in spelling as a final silent -e, whose main purpose is to signal that the previous consonant is pronounced, e.g. port "port" vs. porte "door" . These changes also eliminated the difference between singular and plural in most words: ports "ports" (still ), portes "doors" (still ). Final consonants reappear in liaison contexts (in close connection with a following vowel-initial word), e.g. nous "we" vs. nous avons "we have", il fait "he does" vs. fait-il ? "does he?". In Portuguese, final unstressed /o/ and /u/ were apparently preserved intact for a while, since final unstressed /u/, but not /o/ or /os/, triggered metaphony (see above). Final-syllable unstressed /o/ was raised in preliterary times to /u/, but always still written . At some point (perhaps in late Galician-Portuguese), final-syllable unstressed /e/ was raised to /i/ (but still written ); this remains in Brazilian Portuguese, but has developed to in northern and central European Portuguese. In Catalan, final unstressed > . In many dialects, unstressed and merge into as in Portuguese, and unstressed and merge into . However, some dialects preserve the original five-vowel system, most notably standard Valencian.