Word Play: A tricky language

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, September 16, 2022. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s time now for Word Play.

Actually, today we’re playing with letters.

And if spelling isn’t your strong suit, well, George Grant is about to make you feel a lot better. Or worse, maybe.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: Though it is now indisputably the world’s lingua franca, English remains one of the most challenging languages to learn for non-native speakers. Even though it is rife with rules, those rules are challenged at every turn by exceptions, inconsistencies, and illogical constructions.

For example, the “silent final E” rule asserts that when a word ends in E, the vowel simply amplifies the prior syllable, as in made, done, and skate. It is unpronounced, except when it is, as in fiancé, recipe, and macrame.

Strictly enforced the rule, “never end a sentence with a preposition,” can result in extremely awkward prose. As Winston Churchill quipped, “It is rule up with which I will not put.”

The rule, “I before E except after C,” is supposed to be an easy way to remember the spelling pattern of common words that came into English from French, including receive, conceive, and ceiling as well as deceit and receipt. But of course, there are many weird exceptions like, well, the word weird. The many different sources of our language, Latin, Greek, German, Norse, Gaelic, and a panoply of dialects, all have their own spelling paradigms—and that means English does not have anything like a systematic orthography.

Grammarians, inclined as they are to order, have created rules aimed at making English tidier and easier to learn. Alas, their rules often were created long after most words passed into common usage.

Many of the words that seem to be exceptions to the “I before E” rule have roots in Old English—words like eight, weigh, neighbor, and sleigh. So, in an attempt to take this into account, some English-as-a-Second-Language curricula have created a variant to the old rule: “I before E except after C; Or when pronounced A, as in neighbor and weigh.”

Alas, even that adapted rule has exceptions. So, Webster’s Online Dictionary has proposed this variant of the variant: “I before E except after C; Or when pronounced A, as in neighbor and weigh; Unless the C is has a SH sound as in glacier; Or it appears in comparatives and superlatives like fancier; And also, except when the diphthong is sounded as E as in seize; Or I as in height; Or also in ING inflected words ending in E, as in cueing; Or in compound words, as in albeit; Or occasionally, in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages, as in cuneiform.

Perhaps Catherynne Valente was right when she quipped, “English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey—just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.”

I’m George Grant.

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