I saw this in the Providence Journal but didn't believe it until I found it here.

Every time the Government interferes with teaching it is a precursor to disaster. There was a long item on the Beeb this morning about this very suggestion and the head teacher who was being asked to comment simply said that teaching methods were up to teachers, and that the "i before e" mantra would be useful to some children and not to others. Good teachers would know when to use this and other mantras and when not.

It seems they're after all those pesky words infused by those blighters, the Normans.

We were taught it with the addition of a couple of lines: 'When "ie" is pronounced "ee" and except after c.'

quote:

Greg Brooks, a literacy expert, formerly of the University of Sheffield, told the Times Educational Supplement that the rule was thoroughly misleading. He said there were too many exceptions, including eight, feisty, foreign, heinous, protein and seize.

eight, feisty, foreign, heinous are irrelevant because they have a different vowel sound.

Here is the passage from the government report from here

quote:

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.

Leaving aside the question of whether the government should be telling teachers what to teach, this doesn't seem like bad advice, especially since even literacy experts like Greg Brooks are getting the rule wrong.

I tend, when teaching pronunciation or spelling, to avoid teaching "rules" about it, not because there are often exceptions (even though that's true), but because the students usually find them more confusing than helpful.

Language Log has a story about the report and a discussion of it on BBc.

quote:

eight, feisty, foreign, heinous are irrelevant because they have a different vowel sound.

goofy, I think many just learned the rule about i before e, without linking it to the ee sound. I never learned to equate it with the ee sound, for example.

I never have thought it a good rule because it can be misleading. The whole extension that there are "no rules" in English or that spelling shouldn't be taught is ridiculous. That one particular rule confuses learners. Let's ditch it, but not make a big deal of it.

Put me on the list of those who never heard the alleged rest of the rule "when the sound is ee." Seems an entire generation or two of American teachers didn't "know what they were doing," by Pullam's measure. The rule does work better with the ee, but I just can't get excited about this whole discussion, somehow; don't feel as if I've lost an old friend or anything. The rules were boring and confusing to me as a child, and the only way I could ever learn to spell anything correctly was to memorize each word individually. Thank goodness nowadays for spell checkers! Miss Thistlebottom can't get me now!

Wordmatic

quote:

Thank goodness nowadays for spell checkers! Miss Thistlebottom can't get me now!

Oh no?

http://www.proofreadnz.co.nz/Spell_checker.html

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
Oh no?
http://www.proofreadnz.co.nz/Spell_checker.html

Oh no. I'm not saying spell checkers are flawless. Far from it. But time and again that little red line has alerted me that I've possibly misspelled something, forcing me to look it up and correct it if necessary. I was not Miss Thistlebottom's best speller, let me add, and don't mind admitting I need a crutch.

WM

I agree, WM, particularly with the part about not getting excited about one minuscule rule. [By the way, my trusty spellchecker pointed out that I had misspelled "minuscule."]

I do like your poem, Richard, and there are others. I know that we've talked about the hazards of spellcheckers before, but one of my favorites occurred in our organization. The "official" email went out from a Board talking about their members, including a public member. Unfortunately, because of a typo, the "l" didn't make it, and of course the spellchecker didn't catch it.

Michael Quinion has an informative article on it in his latest newsletter (link). I hadn't known that Fowler came up with the "ee" sound addition.

That seems quite reasonable, z. Thanks for posting it, and I am glad to see that he has another book coming out!

No
i before e should never be taught as it just doesn't work.

It has left me unable to spell a whole family of words: friend, field, weird, receive, etc. The rule is no help with these. Most other words I can spell without thought, but this stupid rule has confised me for 35 years.

(I put these four into a spellchecker before submission and got 3 of the 4 wrong!)

I'm constantly confused WRT the "i before e business," and also the British vs American spellings of many words.

Asa, who's knee-deep in cow manoeuvre and bull shift.

It seems to me that the rule is taught in US English without the important caveat that it only applies when the ie/ei combination is pronounced at "ee".

According to that full rule, all of Graham's examples work in accordance with the rule. Only receive has the vowels pronounced as "ee" and only receive has them preceded by a "c".

Not just the US. I don't recall ever being taught the "pronounced" as "ee" bit when I was at school.

I was definitely taught that full version. "I before E, except after C, when IE is pronounced 'EE'." I remember my teacher added a couple of exceptions as a rider, "seize" and "weird". I'm not so sure that "weird" is in fact an exception, since the dipthong isn't pronounced "EE".

quote:

Originally posted by arnie:
I'm not so sure that "weird" is in fact an exception, since the dipthong isn't pronounced "EE".

It is in my dialect. I guess the rule isn't even going to make sense to everyone.

I pronounce "weird" like "w-ear-d," not "weerd." Interesting, goofy. [I know, I should have learned the IPA. Sorry!]

This one is actually quite an easy one to demonstrate with or without the IPA.

DO you pronounce weird and weed the same? I'd be surprised if you do as I haven't encountered a dialect where that's the case. The vowel sound in "weed" is a single sound. You can say it without moving your mouth position. In fact try saying "eeeeeeeeeeee". Easy isn't it?
Now with weird, the point of articulation changes. You cannot make the sound with your mouth just held in one position so it's impossible to hold it as a continuous sound.

Well, we pronounce the r in General American English, and the sound between the w and the d is a diphthong in weird, while it's a long vowel in weed. That's one difference. The other difference is that the first vowel in the diphthong in weird is different than the long vowel in weed, and it is not the length I am talking about. The first part of the diphthong in weird is more like the i in bit, and the one in weed is more like the vowel in meet. (In IPA I could condense this to weird /'wɪɚd/ and weed /'wi:d/.) Not sure about the Canadian English that goofy is using. I can see /'wi:ɚd/ but it sounds weird.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
DO you pronounce weird and weed the same?

No, otherwise they'd be homophones. But I have the same vowel in both:

weed: [wiːd]

weird: [wiˑɹd] or [wiʸɚd]

It's the same vowel in both words in my opinion, altho the phonetic lengths might be different. Bob's right, the point of articulation changes in "weird" because there's an /ɹ/, but it starts off as the same vowel.

The tense-lax distinction seems to be generally neutralized before /ɹ/, so I'm not surprised that some dialects have a different vowel.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

The rule only applies to the pure vowel, pronounced like the "ee" in "weed". It does not apply to dipthongs - or indeed to any other sound. Just "ee". It matters not how the sound starts; if it changes halfway through its articulation then it is not "ee" and the rule doesn't apply.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
The rule only applies to the pure vowel, pronounced like the "ee" in "weed". It does not apply to dipthongs - or indeed to any other sound. Just "ee". It matters not how the sound starts; if it changes halfway through its articulation then it is not "ee" and the rule doesn't apply.

Except field where it does still work?

The rule just has too many provisos. It relies on deep knowledge of dipthongs. It only works with a narrow range of pronunciations. It should not be taught!

quote:

Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
It seems they're after all those pesky words infused by those blighters, the Normans.

The blasted Normans seem to be the source of the exception to the exception as well! ("seize")

The blasted Normans

To give you all a flavor of what spelling was like in Middle English, the extant spellings of seisen 'to take possession of' from the online Middle English Dictionary (link):

quote:

seise, seize, saise, sese(n, sesse, sesi(e, seas(s)e, (chiefly early) seisi, saisi & ces(s)e; p. seised(e, etc. & sezed, seasod, ceased; ppl. seised, etc. & iseis(e)d, isesed, seisit.

The etymology is also interesting, from Old French saisir, seisir, ses(s)ir & ML saisīre, saizīre, seisīre, sesīre, Anglo-Latin seizīre. It's probably a Frankish loanword into French and Latin, related to the Germanic *setjan 'to put, place', whence English set; the Germanic verb would be the causative form of *sitan 'to sit'.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
The rule only applies to the pure vowel, pronounced like the "ee" in "weed". It does not apply to dipthongs - or indeed to any other sound. Just "ee". It matters not how the sound starts; if it changes halfway through its articulation then it is not "ee" and the rule doesn't apply.

Then it applies to "weird" in my dialect, because in my dialect "weird" contains the same vowel as "weed".

Ignore my statement about the articulation changing. I forgot that Bob is British, and in British English the vowel in "weird" is a diphthong. But in my dialect it isn't, it's the same vowel as in "weed".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

quote:

Except field where it does still work?

It works just fine for "field".

quote:

Ignore my statement about the articulation changing. I forgot that Bob is British, and in British English the vowel in "weird" is a diphthong. But in my dialect it isn't, it's the same vowel as in "weed".

Then for you "weed" and "weird" are homophones (which you said they were not).

It's not the vowel, it's the sound that matters. If the i/e combination is pronounced as is the double e in "weed" then the rule applies. If it isn't, then the rule doesn't apply.

For me "weird" is pronounced "wee-erd" - not "weed".

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
It's not the vowel, it's the sound that matters.

I don't know what you're talking about anymore. Look at my transcriptions above, and you'll see that I have the same vowel in both words. That's it. The sounds after the vowel are irrelevant. Sure, the /ɹ/ affects the articulation of the vowel, but all sounds in all words are affected by the surrounding sounds. Now we're talking about phonetic variation instead of phonemes.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:

If the i/e combination is pronounced as is the double e in "weed" then the rule applies. If it isn't, then the rule doesn't apply.

For me "weird" is pronounced "wee-erd" - not "weed".

Based on that description, and having heard your accent, I would transcribe your pronunciation as [wiːəd]. So perhaps in your dialect, the diphthong [iːə] is perceived as a seperate phoneme than the vowel in [wiːd]. But in my speech, I perceive the vowels in both words as the same phoneme.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Call it a vowel, a phoneme or what you will. It's the sound of the ie or ei combination that I speak of. If the sound is that of double-e as in weed, tree, bee or see, then the rule applies. If for you, "weird" is pronounced exactly the same as "weed", then you have proved the rule wrong in your dialect. If it is not, then you have proved the rule right.

I don't know the phonetic alphabet, but for me weird rhymes with feared or beard. It does not rhyme with weed - which it would have to do for the i before e rule to be wrong in this instance.

goofy does not pronounce weed and weird the same, because the latter contains an extra sound, that of an r, but the vowel after the w is the same for him in both. What is so difficult to understand about that?

What zmježd said. I have the same vowel in field as well. But field doesn't rhyme with weed because there's another sound - the l. Just like there's another sound - the r - in weird.

The confusion here may be arising because Richard's accent, like mine, completely lacks a rhotic r. Analyse as you might you will never hear an "r" when either of us says the word "weird". What we have is a glide from ee to uh which you could analyse as two separate vowels or as one diphthong. Either way, there isn't any "r" sound.

I know, Bob, but since Richard has met me, he also knows that my accent is rhotic and that I have an r where he doesn't.

I suspect that the "r" is causing the confusion. The total combination of all the letters does not produce an "ee" sound between the "w" and the "d" - for whatever reason - and that is why the I before E rule does not apply.

Mind you, had I heard you say "weird" when we met in Toronto I might have taken more notice.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
I suspect that the "r" is causing the confusion. The total combination of all the letters does not produce an "ee" sound between the "w" and the "d" - for whatever reason - and that is why the I before E rule does not apply.

... in your dialect.

I'm baffled why you think rhyming is relevant.

"weed" has the sound "ee" followed by the sound "d", right?
"wield" has the sound "ee" followed by the sounds "ld", right?
"weaned" has the sound "ee" followed by the sounds "nd", right?
So why is it hard to understand that in my dialect, "weird" has the sound "ee" followed by the sounds "rd"?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

quote:

So why is it hard to understand that in my dialect, "weird" has the sound "ee" followed by the sounds "rd"?

I've heard people say WEE-erd at times in the US.

quote:

I'm baffled why you think rhyming is relevant.

Rhyming is relevant only as an illustration of the sound. If the sound of the assemblage of symbols (consonants as well as vowels) rhymes with "ee" as in "weed", then the ie before e rule applies.

In your examples, "weed" and "weaned" are near rhymes and the "ee" and "ea" are sounded the same. "Wield" does not have the same sound in UK English since the consonant "l" (as the consonant "r" in "weird") modifies the sound of the previous vowels - although "l" is slightly different in that it is sounded whereas "r" is not.

The overall effect is that "wield" is prounounced as "wee-uld" and "weird" as "wee-ud". It would seem that the way in which certain consonants modify certain preceding vowels is different in US, Canadian and UK English - this effect probably being greatest with the letter "r". "Er" and "eir" are both pronounced as one vowel sound and the "r" is not sounded at all.

quote:

I forgot that Bob is British, and in British English the vowel in "weird" is a diphthong. But in my dialect it isn't, it's the same vowel as in "weed".

That's one situation then where my dialect is closer to UK's English than to Canadian's. It's a dipthong for me, though that I do pronounce the "r."

i before e
except after c and in field
when the sound is ee apart from weird

If only I had been taught that at school, I would be the world spelling champion!

The amount of churn in this thread proves one thing to my mind, English spelling ain't.

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
I've heard people say WEE-erd at times in the US.

That's exactly how I say it!

Wordmatic

quote:

quote:
Originally posted by Proofreader:
I've heard people say WEE-erd at times in the US.


That's exactly how I say it!

That's weird.

quote:

Originally posted by Graham Nice:
No
i before e should never be taught as it just doesn't work.

It has left me unable to spell a whole family of words: friend, field, weird, receive, etc. The rule is no help with these. Most other words I can spell without thought, but this stupid rule has confised me for 35 years.

(I put these four into a spellchecker before submission and got 3 of the 4 wrong!)

I have been equally confised (whatever that is) but "i before e except after c" with the ee pronunciation exception, is a good GENERAL rule, not a lockstep prescription. There is no substitute for knowing how a word is spelled correctly and there is no reasonable excuse for chronic misspelling. Spellcheckers as has been demonstrated are a weak backup, not to be relied upon by the serious writer--if anything, it gives false confidence.