24 November 2004 
Big fat lie
Why do we teach this to children?
I before E... and a few other exceptions like conscience, weird, their, science, deity, society, Fahrenheit, ancient, either, protein ...
Except after C
And when sounded like A
As in neighbor and weigh
Comments
It could be argued that conscience and ancient employ the i as a device to modify the preceding consonants, that their and deity are properly pronounced with a long a, that weird and protein used to be pronounced with a long a, that science and society employ the i as a long i, that Fahrenheit is a foreign name, and that either is simply a freak occurrence, but the truth is that standardized spelling in the English language is a mess, and all attempts to teach it are simply kludges. Cf. Samuel Webster, hack and language fascist.
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