Daniel Lepage on 21 Mar 2003 01:02:00 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Changing Unanimous Yes



On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 07:44  PM, Rob Speer wrote:

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 11:24:20AM -0600, Orc In A Spacesuit wrote:
From: Luk Vandelaer <luk.vandelaer@xxxxxxx>
PS. Question: is it recEIve or recIEve ?
   In the rules, receive is used 48 times and recieve 32 times.

"I before E, except after C" ...and some other funky exception. In this
case, it's after C, so it's EI, or recEIve.

I hate the I before E "rule" in all its variations.

Once I took a dictionary file and sorted out all the words with ie or
ei. The fact is that the rule "I before E, always", while blatantly
wrong, is correct more often than "I before E except after C". Adding
the "or when sounded as A" exception makes it do only slightly better.

But that means you just have to remember how to spell 'receive'.

I ran similar diagnostics myself, and found far more 'cie's than 'cei's. Lots of variants on 'science'; that sort of thing really throws off the rule.

I suspect that the 'i before e' rule is meant to apply only to nonobvious situations - with a word like 'science', the pronunciation makes it clear that the 'i' comes before the 'e'. If it were pronounced as one syllable, "Seenz" instead of "Si-anz" (if you understand my impromptu pronunciation strings), then it would probably be spelt "Sceince"

--
Wonko

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