Probably the most famous “rule”: “I before E, except after C or when sounded as A, as in neighbour and weigh. And weird is just weird.”
That, of course, ignores exceptions like eight, vein, and veil. In fact, as a rule, it’s useless.
Sure. And, of course, that’s one of the first things you learn when you begin to learn it. It’s also said to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, language for an English speaker to learn that is written in the Roman alphabet. (Polish also often comes up in this regard.) It can be completely bewildering, as the languages are structured quite differently.
I think that rule has been shown to have more exceptions than adherents. Which makes it a very strange usage of the word “rule”
I would really doubt that to literally be the case, but there’s enough exceptions that it’s useless. (Well, I admit, I do use it from time to time to remind myself that it’s receive and receipt and stuff like that, so I guess I do sometimes find myself calling back to it.)
My favourite quote on the capriciousness and impermenance of the English language is
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
–James D. Nicoll
here’s one article that refers to it. It seems like the “except after c” bit is the real problem. But yeah. Which ever way you slice it it seems to be pretty useless as a rule.
Nice! So new rule is “i before e and you’ll be right 75% of the time.”
Yes, I think that is the English language in a nutshell. “here is a rule, just assume it is useless and make it up as you go along”
There are exceptions, but not eight or vein. Those fit the “sound like A” part of the rule.
That said, a critique I have of that particular study is that the rule, as I’ve always understood it, really only applies to words that have a single vowel sound that is spelled by either “ei” or “ie.” Granted, that is not mentioned in the rule. But using a word like icier or fancier or science as exceptions is going to inflate the “except after c” part. Any adjective ending in -cy is going to have -ier and -iest variants that will prove as exceptions to the rule, though I personally have never thought of applying this “rule” to such words.
But, yes, to explain it, all the exceptions, etc. – better just not bother teaching it in the first place.
You do realize that in all three of those words the sound is A so they are not exceptions to the rule you quoted.
One of the other members of a forum where I hang out uses the .sig “There are no rules in English, only guidance. Some guidance looks like a rule; it probably isn’t.”
I’m just browsing this days old thread now but this standup bit perfectly illustrates the complexities of the word ‘shit.’ Caution: Contains mentions of the word ‘shit.’
Ha ha. That was great.
Makes perfect sense.
I think the rule is that -i suffixes (-ic, -ity, -ify, -tion, -ial, -ian) pull the stress to the syllable preceding them.
That same comedian has a similar routine about various meanings of the word “ass.” Very funny.
Every native English word, other than those that begin with a prefix, is stressed on the first syllable. No exceptions. (“Native” here means a word that was not borrowed from another language.)
An apparent exception is “enough”, but the first syllable was once a prefix “ge-”.
Here’s another exceptionless rule: No English content words, (“content words” meaning words other than function words like “this”, “there”, “the”), begin with the voiced “th” sound. That means that you can’t have a name in English that begins with that sound.
How much of modern English is made up of words that weren’t borrowed from another language?
They’re English words now. And I very much doubt that most English speakers know which words are derived from Old English and which aren’t.
Thorn?