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

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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