Why do we teach this to children?
I before E
except after C
and when sounded like A
as in neighbor and weigh
.... with just a few exceptions:
- ancient
- caffeine
- concierge
- conscience
- deity
- efficient
- either
- Fahrenheit
- feisty
- financier
- foreign
- forfeit
- height
- heist
- heinous
- kaleidoscope
- keister
- leisure
- obeisance
- protein
- reify
- reïnforce
- science
- seismic
- seize
- slight
- society
- sufficient
- their
- weird
- ....
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.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like maybe you're ignoring the "except after C" part.
ReplyDeleteSharp eye, Anon. I included a few items from another list which proved to contain a few words which obeyed the “cei” rule.
ReplyDelete