Orthographically Again...
Apparently, quite a lot of people heard about the recommended discontinuation of the ‘i before e’ rule I wrote about yesterday. Language Log now has a post about it (there’s even a link to where the original governmental report can be downloaded).
Also, it came up at a birthday gathering I was at last night. One person commented that a teacher had once told him that all rules have exceptions; Otherwise, the rule is not really a rule, but simply the way things are. Hence the concept, I suppose, of ‘the exception that proves the rule’.
This idea speaks, I think, to the difference between acquisition (language) and learning (orthography). One could argue that language does have rules, and the concurrent exceptions (e.g. the English past tense, as I mentioned yesterday). Indeed, the study of linguistics involves investigating and explaining what these rules are. On another level, though, for the child learner the language simply is the way it is. Consequently, the typical native speaker of a language often can’t explain even the simplest things about how it works. Orthography, on the other hand, has a sense of artificiality. It doesn’t come naturally to children in the same way as language. And yet, even with its irregularities, spelling is much less complex than grammar.
Perhaps this characterisation of language and orthography is an oversimplification, but I found the question of what makes a rule a rule an interesting one.
