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Worst rule ever (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by zedgeist@lemmy.world to c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You got me curious, so I checked it.

I downloaded this wordlist with 479k words, and used find+replace to count four strings: cie, cei, ie, ei. Here's the result:

16566 (75%) ie vs. 5649 (25%) ei
875 cie (74%) vs. 302 cei (26%)

So the basic rule (i before e) holds some merit, but the "except after c" part is bullshit - it's practically the same distribution.

Of course, this takes all words as equiprobable; results would be different if including the odds of a word appearing in the text into the maths.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 7 months ago

Of course, this takes all words as equiprobable; results would be different if including the odds of a word appearing in the text into the maths.

I feel like it works more like 90% of the time when it comes up, so maybe this. And could it be that the words where "ie" appears are more ambiguous somehow, like don't fit neatly into some existing pattern?

I don't remember the "after c" bit ever coming up, on the other hand, so that makes sense.