Endnotes Spelling Bee: I Before E

This is the first in a series of short episodes about individual problematic spellings in English, responding to comments from our Spelling video . This one covers the "I before E" rule.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes Spelling Bee! In this miniseries I’m following up on the question I asked in my video about Spelling: what are your spelling pet peeves? First up, I tackle the dreaded I before E rule.

Viewers RMoribyashi and Silkwesir brought this one up. So, the main problem with the I before E except after C rule is that it isn’t actually a rule. It’s just a mnemonic invented in the 19th century. It doesn’t reflect any reality about the phonological histories or etymologies of the words, it’s just meant to work in many but not all circumstances. And the common formulation of the mnemonic isn’t complete anyway, as it should have in its full form some sort of restriction as in “I before E except after C or when sounded as A as in neighbour and weigh” or “I before E except after C when the sound is E”. These fuller forms catch some of the exceptions, but not all, such as sufficient and plurals of words that end in cy like frequencies (with a c followed by an i), and seize (with an ei pronounced /i/ not /eɪ). The underlying problem here is that a number of different vowel sounds are represented by these two letter combinations, vowel sounds that changed in different ways over time and came from a number of different source languages. This is in part a function of the English language having contained, over its long history, far more distinct vowel sounds than vowel letters to represent them, so that the same couple of vowel combinations were introduced again and again in different contexts as the sounds changed. For instance the word eight comes from Old English eahte or æhta, which became ehte in Early Middle English, diphthongized to eighte in later Middle English because it was followed by a guttural sound, which was then dropped to leave us with Modern English eight. The commonly cited exceptions neighbour and weigh followed similar paths. A number of words with the ei and ie spellings come from Old French ultimately from Latin with a number of different vowel sounds: Latin vena with an e becomes Old French veine and English vein with an /eɪ pronunciation, while Latin brevis becomes bref in Old French and Middle English and brief in Modern English. Latin decipere (a prefixed form of capere) becomes Old French decevoir and English deceive with an /i/ pronunciation. Latin licere becomes Old French and Middle English leisir and Modern English leisure. Latin sufficiens with two distinct vowel sounds keeps the same ie as it goes from Old French to Modern English sufficient. And finally the Latin adverb foris produced the Medieval Latin adjective foraneus which becomes Old French forain and has a number of Middle English forms such as ferren, foran, foreyne before settling down as Modern English foreign. And that still doesn’t cover it all. As viewer The Hard Problem2 quipped, "'I' before 'E', except after 'C', and when sounding like 'A' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh' and all throughout August and the month of May and you'll always be wrong no matter what you say!"

I’ll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more Spelling Bee videos intermittently for the next while, in between other main videos. Thanks for all the responses, you've given me lots to work with! As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!