Words that should be respelt

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

CIE: ancient, efficient, deficient, glacier
CEI: ceiling, receive

The ratio is about 2:1. The CIE words aren't covered by this (misquoted) rule, but some people do not pay enough attention in class.

Note that the CIE examples all have a pair of vowel sounds, rather than the single vowel sounds quoted in the CEI examples. This seems to be the important difference, as one merely puts down the two vowels sounded in the first set.

About the only exceptions to I before E (one sound) are seize and weird. It may be argued that because of the influence of the R that weird comes out with two distinct vowel sounds. Perhaps it depends on how fast you say it.

No teaching method can give a student the ability to spell an unfamiliar word reliably.

Here I quite disagree. The way I was taught did exactly that, and with near-perfect reliability -- at the very least insofar as the word is of regular spelling, which is the great bulk of all the hundred fifty thousand or so English words in regular modern use -- a fraction of the total in the Oxford English Dictionary. It usually delivers on the weirdies as well. The method is Phonics, and it made a superb speller of me by the third grade; I could visualize a word's spelling as I spoke it.

What's Phonics, essentially? It's a course of study that rehearses all the ways English comes up with to spell a given noise, and which English words use which way. When all's said and done, spelling becomes simple for the Phonics student, who can confidently "sound words out," and reading and garnering meaning from reading become very pleasurable, and he can readily navigate and be entertained by such Seussian constructions as "The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough."

It's not that English has no system of orthography; it's that it has two: one for the Germanic-group words and one for the Latinate. Add those loan-words kept in their original languages' spellings to stir the pot, and you have the current farrago.