This terminology reflects the historical pronunciation and development of those vowels, but as a phonetic description of their current values it may no longer be accurate. The English values of the letters used to be similar to the values those letters had in Spanish, French or Italian, namely , , , , . The Great Vowel Shift leading to Early Modern English gave current English "long vowels" values that differ markedly from the "short vowels" that they relate to in writing. Since English has a literary tradition that goes back into the Middle English period, written English continues to use Middle English writing conventions to mark distinctions that had been reordered by the chain shift of the long vowels. However, the pronunciation of before silent , found mainly in borrowings from French and Latin, is a consequence not of the Great Vowel Shift but of a different series of changes.