I wish to lodge an official protest against the teachers who chose 
to implant in the brain of me and many other young impressionable 
schoolchildren the "i before e" rule.
It seemed as though they might be on to something; many was the time, in
my youth, when I was unable to decide which of the two should follow the 
other.
        "A rule?" exclaimed I, "how utterly perfect of you, to provide 
some guidance in negotiating the illogical roads of modern english!"
        (Playing the part of naive schoolgirl, I was)
        Things went tolerably well until I began to notice exceptions
to the rule.
        First were the "a" sounds. One has a neighbor, one weighs things...
        "All right," they proclaimed, "except when sounding like 'a' as in
neighbor and weigh."
        It was the height of misinformation.
        To my count, there are nearly as many words containing the pair
"ei" as there are those containing "ie."
        (discounting ei ei o, of course, those being truly foreign words)
        How did this rule come to reign? When will we rein it in?

18 responses total.

Trouble maker.

Beautiful.  :-)

Trouble maker?

Well...

I believe a visit to the kitchen is in order.

The rule as I learned it (not in school, I think) was "'i' before 'e',
except after 'c', and when pronounced 'a' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'".
The only exception that I'm aware of is "seize".

Hmm. Weird.

Their rule is.

exactly.

Curious - is the apparent lack of consistency in the English language w.r.t.
spelling, e.g., indeed "illogical" or merely "arbitrary" ?  Certainly many
things - e.g. the many letter combinations that are pronounced with a long A -
would not be tolerated in a computer language.  Until the ANSI restrictions
were relaxed, of course!  :-)

seize and weird are not the only exceptions by any means, Grace.
(forfeit, foreign, leisure) (also foreign names, like "Weiss")

This rule has always annoyed me, too. But not because there are more 
exceptions than cases which follow, but rather because the expression
of the rule could easily have eliminated more exceptions than it does
if it were only slightly changed (and without eliminating cases that follow).

Instead of disengaging the rule when sounding as 'a' as in neighbor or weigh,
They should have disallowed it whenever the sound is other than long 'e',
Thus the most common sound 'e' would still have the rule apply
receive, deceit, mien, fiendish, diesel, etc.

And all these exceptions would be disallowed as exceptions and stop
causing trouble:
forfeit, weird, foreign, Weiss,
even leisure can be explained away by pronouncing it to rhyme with treasure
instead of seizure.

seize and seizure are the only exceptions I know of to *this* rule.

The nice thing is that it handles German words well, (and we have many),
since in German "ie" is always pronounced like a long "e" and the rule
holds, while "ei" is always pronounce as a long "i", and so these cases
are properly excepted. Yes, my name rhymes with rice, not fleece.

OK Steve, state your revised rule - rhyme, of course.

This response has been erased.

   'i' before 'e'
   when the word rhymes with 'fee'
   except after 'c'

   and except, if you please,
   in 'seizure' and 'seize'

Thank you, John. Much better poetry than I could have done.
The analysis is exactly as I stated.

Shucks. I really did want to hear Steve's try. But I can't deny that
John's effort does scan well. Now I have to forget "i before e....."

Steve (srw), I've known people named Weinstein pronounced "Winesteen".
Americans, not Germans, obviously.  (But also not "Vineshtine" because
it's English.)

It is true that some families have changed the pronunciation of their
surnames from the original German. And yes, in most cases the W is
pronounced as in English, not German (my name sounds like "vice" in German).

But these are corruptions, mostly due (i'd guess) to the fact that so
many Americans could not pronounce their name properly, so they gave in.

As for the question, "Is it illogical or merely arbitrary?", I would answer,
"Neither."

The spellings were being fixed (by the simple act of writing them) just
a bit before the Great Vowel Shift.  I *think* a great many of the words
that are spelled similarly *used* to be pronounced similarly.  Of course,
this does raise the question of why some words shifted but not others.

Are you suggesting that "ie" and "ei" used to be the same sound, or that all
the "ie"s used to sound one way and all the "ei"s used to sound the other way?

To hint at an answer to your last question, usually a sound shift will depend
on its context.  For instance, "drop the letter k, but _only before n_",
giving us words like "knight" and "knife," but leaving "king" unchanged. 
Vowels might have shifted only around certain consonants, or on accented or
unaccented syllables, or some such.

That said, I don't actually know what contexts they shifted in.  

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