On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote:
From: Doug
Jackson
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 3:05 PM
My wonderful, patient wife is an English teacher,
and an easy way to
rev her up is to remind her that English is a living language, subject
to constant change, and that the only language that has truly static
spelling is Latin! Remember - "I before E, unless after C (and then
only sometimes)"
Not even Latin spelling is entirely static--ecclesiastical Latin
spellings often differ from the classical language.
And it's
i before e except after c,
if the sound of the word is 'long e'
which, as someone with multiple degrees in linguistics, irritates me a
bit (there being no such thing as "long" vowels in modern English--it's
a holdover from Graeco-Latin grammars).
I'm not sure about you, but for me the "long" qualifier was taught
as
denoting vowels that 'sound like their names', i.e. the A in 'plate' as
opposed to the A in 'flat'.
Now, being in the process of trying to teach myself Latin, I understand what
you're saying, but I guess you must decide if you want to accept modern
usage as the new "correct" use or not.
Also, we learned it as:
i before e except after c,
or when sounded as 'a'
like in neighbor and weigh.
John
--
"I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS
reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter
S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba