"i" before "e" except after "c"

[Victor]

I am approaching this from a somewhat different perspective, having
(mis)spent much of my "youth" teaching math. This is not so much a
"rule" as a mnemonic device--largely superficial ditties that teachers
like to refer to as "rules", to add a little semblance of order to their
otherwise chaotic world. When it comes to math, many of these mnemonics
are highly counterproductive, as they often must be untaught when the
students progress to higher-level math. Language does not have quite the
same rigorous structure as math, and regularities, particularly in
English spelling, are somewhat harder to come upon. So the "rules" often
appear to be far more absolute than they really are--the number of
qualifiers needed to make a complete case is so large that the rule
would become useless if they needed to be taught.  The current example
demonstrates it quite adequately.

I suspect, there would be a lot less argument if we stopped looking at
"rules" in this context as something absolute--we are not talking about
syntax theories or morphology. This is an attempt to bring some
regularization and make students learn an imperceptible pattern easier.
Such "rules" rely as much on student intuition (often nonexistent) as
they do on actual patterns. There is no reason to pretend that there is
some scientific certainty attached to them.

    VS-)


Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Something profoundly symbolic in all this.  It takes a teacher a minute or
>> so to teach the rule correctly. That rule will allow students, by and
>> large, to save many minutes over their lifetimes that would otherwise be
>> wasted in misspelling words that needn't be misspelled.  On the whole, a
>> plus.
>>
>> Yet the British educational opponents of the rule have (or have been
>> misreported as having) seized on it for special scorn and removal from the
>> curriculum.
>>
>
> See Geoff Pullum's update to his Language Log post:
>
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1525
>
> The relevant passage of the "Support For Spelling" document states:
>
> ---
> http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/183127 (p. 106)
> Note: The i before e except after c rule is not worth teaching. It
> applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear /ee/
> sound and unless this is known, words such as sufficient, veil and
> their look like exceptions. There are so few words where the ei
> spelling for the /ee/ sound follows the letter c that it is easier to
> learn the specific words: receive, conceive,deceive (+ the related
> words receipt, conceit, deceit), perceive and ceiling.
> ---
>
> Geoff writes, "What the document actually says is basically right in
> every respect (by 'clear ee sound' they mean monophthongal [i:]). They
> are saying that teaching the list of '-cei-' words directly is a
> better strategy than teaching the rule: it is not sufficiently general
> to pay its way. It was the moronic press reports and radio discussions
> that made it sound as if rules were being abandoned and (one was
> invited to infer) standards lowered."
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org