I before E

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jun 25, 2009, at 11:22 AM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> If I can equate "default" with "elsewhere,"

yes, default, elsewhere case, otherwise case, or general case.

> it seems odd that in this
> case it's the marked EI, the form conditioned by a preceding <c>
> and found in exceptions, that acts as the default.  I don't disagree
> with your conclusion, but the behavior seems odd.

when you say "found in exceptions", you're taking the point of view of
the traditional formulations.  the question is what is best treated as
exceptions or special cases and what as the general case, and this is
something to be reasoned through.

as i've said before, the customary british guidelines apply only to IE/
EI spelling /i/, but that covers a pretty small territory.  here's a
sampling of the relevant words with IE (exceptions, with EI spelling /
i/, were listed in earlier postings); the list contains some related
verb-noun pairs, and is limited in the phonological contexts for the /
i/:

   belief, believe, brief, chief, grief, grieve, liege, rabies,
relief, relieve, retrieve, scabies, series, siege, species, thief

[note: if you search text for IE words, you'll get a fair number of
irrelevant examples, in particular, for words spelled with final Y,
plurals of nouns (fancies) and presents and pasts of verbs (fancies,
fancied).  these do have (for some speakers) IE representing /i/, but
that's the result of the spelling rule to change final Y (after a
consonant letter) to I and add ES/ED.

you'll also pull up several other kinds of irrelevancies, for instance
comparatives in IER and superlatives in IEST, again the result of that
final-Y rule for spelling.  these are doubly irelevant, since the IE
in them spells a sequence of vowels in successive syllables, not a
single vocalic nucleus.

despite all this, there are, ack, a modest number of misspellings you
can google up with EIS, EID, EIR, EIST -- both after C (fanceis,
fanceid, fanceir, fanceist) and not (hurreis, hurreid, happeir,
happeist).  i wonder how many such misspellings there would be if
people hadn't been taught "rules" for spelling IE vs. EI.]

the amended "british" version has two levels of exception and default:

When the letters I and E are used together to spell a vocalic nucleus:
(Ba) in spelling /i/,
     (Bai) use EI after C;
     (Baii) otherwise use IE;
(Bb) otherwise (i.e., in spelling any other nucleus) use EI.

or, equivalently,

When the letters I and E are used together to spell a vocalic nucleus:
(Bb) use EI;
(Ba) except in spelling /i/, in which case,
    (Baii) use IE;
    (Bai) except after C, in which case use EI.

the "american" version has one level of exception and default, but
with two separate exceptions:

When the letters I and E are used together to spell a vocalic nucleus:
(Aa) use EI after C;
(Ab) use EI when the nucleus is /e/;
(Ac) otherwise use IE.

or, equivalently,

When the letters I and E are used together to spell a vocalic nucleus:
(Ac) use IE;
(Aa+b) except after C, or when the nucleus is /e/, in which case use EI.

arnold

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