It is a feast to the eyes to see a tree
Blossomed full with flowers of various colours

I before E except after C

Last month we talked about spelling a little. In the meantime several of you wrote to me about the iniquities of English spelling , i.e. not written as it is spoken ;-)
I particularly liked GHOTI = fish, GH as in enouGH, O as in wOmen, TI as in staTIon, therefore GHOTI is pronounced 'fish' ;-) Non-native speakers lament the fact that there are so many different rules and so many exception to the rules. I can agree with you there. Consider the rule "I before E except after C". A few exceptions are :-

I before E : absenteeism Aeneid agreeing albeit Alexei Anaheim Andrei apartheid atheism atheist Bahrein beige Beijing being Beirut Bernstein Blenheim Bodleian Boeing Brandeis Budweiser casein Cassiopeia counterfeit cysteine decaffeinate decreeing deify deign deity deoxyribonucleic dyeing edelweiss Einstein Epstein Fahrenheit feign feint Ferreira Fischbein fleeing foreign forfeit forfeiture freeing freight Geiger Geigy geisha gneiss Goldstein guaranteeing Guggenheim Heidelberg heigh height heighten Heine Heinrich Heinz heir heiress Heisenberg herein hereinafter heterogeneity Heublein Holstein (in)homogeneity inveigh inveigle Janeiro kaleidescope kaleidoscope Keith Klein Leigh Leighton Leila leisure leitmotif Liechtenstein lightweight l'oeil Lorelei Madeira Madeleine Marseilles McNeil Meier meiosis Meistersinger middleweight mullein Neil neither nereid nuclei nucleic obeisant Oneida O'Neill onomatopoeia Oppenheimer pantheism pantheist paperweight pharmacopoeia plebeian Pleiades Pleistocene Pompeii Poseidon prosopopoeia protein Raleigh Rayleigh refereeing Reich Reid reign Reilly reimbursable reimburse reindeer reinforce Reinhold reinstate ribonucleic Rosenzweig Schneider Schweitzer seeing Seidel seismic seismograph seismography seismology seize seizure Sergei sheik Sheila simultaneity sleigh sleight sovereign spontaneity stein Steinberg Steiner surfeit surveillant Taipei teeing their theism theist therein Thorstein veil vein vermeil villein Weierstrass weigh weight weighty Weinberg Weinstein weir weird Weiss wellbeing wherein Zeiss

except after C : ancient coefficient concierge conscience conscientious deficient efficient financier glacier hacienda inefficient insufficient omniscient proficient science Societe society species sufficient

Recent general opinion of multi-lingual experts (= me and my mates down at the pub) is that such lists of exceptions are way too long (we decided that 10 would be the maximum number of exceptions we could accept to a rule). So we tried shortening the list, looking at the shortest list first. Here is what we found for "except after C" : unless the ending is ient. This leaves :- concierge conscience conscientious financier glacier hacienda science Societe society species. That's 10 :-)

L ooking at the "I before E" exception list was not as fruitful. We identified some embedded rules :- unless the ending is ist or ism or the root word ends in ee :- absenteeism agreeing atheism atheist decreeing fleeing freeing guaranteeing refereeing seeing teeing. Another suggestion was unless the word is a name or word from another language, typically Jewish or German : Aeneid Alexei Anaheim Andrei Bahrein Beijing Beirut Bernstein Blenheim Boeing Brandeis Budweiser Cassiopeia edelweiss Einstein Epstein Fahrenheit Ferreira Fischbein Geiger Geigy Goldstein Guggenheim Heidelberg Heine Heinrich Heinz Heisenberg Heublein Holstein Janeiro Klein Leigh Leighton Leila Liechtenstein Lorelei Madeira Madeleine Marseilles McNeil Meier Meistersinger Neil Oneida O'Neill Oppenheimer Pompeii Poseidon Raleigh Rayleigh Reich Reid Reilly Reinhold Rosenzweig Schneider Schweitzer Seidel Sergei Sheila Steinberg Steiner Taipei Thorstein Weierstrass Weinberg Weinstein etc.

But if someone is trying to learn English spelling, it is not very useful to require them to recognise which words come from other languages, unless those happen to be their native tongue! Ideally any rules should be of a lexical nature, or, failing that, of a syntactical rather than semantical nature, we decided. Back in the mid 1980s I had had one of my AI students, Roman Jansen-Winkel, look at the problem. He was tasked with writing a program which could detect lexical patterns and induce rules from carefully chosen sequences of examples. He demonstrated his program by having it learn the rules for forming plurals in English from chosen examples. When the program makes a mistake, you merely give it counterexamples and have it try to induce new rules. Here's a demo:-

Input : cat, output -->cat. 
Corrective input : Wrong, cats.
dog--> dogs. (Programm has learned to add an S at the end).
lady-->ladys.
Corrective input : Wrong, ladies.
pony-->ponys.
Corrective input : Wrong, ponies.
body-->bodies. (Programm has learned to transform Y into IES).

continuing with examples like day, boy, the program learned that if a vowel precedes the Y then the Y is not transformed into IES but into YS. It also learned the set of vowels and asked for the name of the set :-) Irregular examples like mouse-->mice, man-->men, led to a table of exceptions. Examples like sheep, prey, etc. had the program (eventually) ask for the name of the set of unchanged words :-) Roman's program comprised 800 lines of PROLOG code, used ~500kb of stacks and data, and needed about 5 minutes of CPU time (on a VAX). He reported that the most difficult task was choosing the examples and getting them in the right sequence :-)

We scrapped that idea after we had it try to learn the I before E except after C rule.

All the more do I admire people who learn several modern languages, and indeed, schoolchildren learning Latin, an anCIEnt tongue! I before E except after C? Really?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2nd September 2006 at 06:02 CEST permalink Email

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