[Izkata]

> The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know.

They may be complicated, but rules exist, and I find it interesting this was the first example you jumped to - there's a rhyme we're taught as kids that works the majority of the time: "'i' before 'e' except after 'c', or when sounded like 'a' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'".

[LatteLazy]

I think this is a really good example actually.

When I was at school (I turned 8 in 2002, I'm a brit in case it matters :) ) it was just "'i' before 'e' except after 'c'".

Thats actually already bad, why swap 2 letters around based on a third if the word sounds the same anyway?

Then we had to add two more caveats to the rule.

And English spelling still doesn't fit this rule, even with the extra bits bolted on. At best it's a guideline (Frequencies or any other pluralised -cy word seems to break it)

Before we learnt 1000 different spellings. Now we learn a rule, but it's quite complex, and then we learn 200 exceptions to this rule.

But for what?

From now on, it's always "ie". Done. Wouldn't that be simpler? We could eliminate the I all together. There is no "I" sound in neighbour or weigh. They should be neybor and way (or if you really need to distinguish all the other Way words, "wey").

Then instead of 1000 hours of frustration, little kids can all spell correctly on day one and get on and do 1000 hours of maths or reading or art or something.

[jimsmart]

It's the fact that these so-called rules have exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions.

Weird. Foreign. Neither. Keith. None of those are sounded as an 'a'.

That's why we can't realistically generalise and say these rules are actual rules - they're more rule of thumb. If you're lucky.

[jimktrains2]

But if you've never seen "weigh" written, how would you spell it. That's the issue, not that we need to memorize baroque hints for words whose spelling we can't fully remember because it's essentially impossible to generate the spelling from first principles.

Then there are words like "stein", that just feel like the rules are too good for them.