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In the Appendix, after a list of nine "useful spelling guidelines", there is a note: The i before e except after c rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear /ee/ sound and unless this is known, words such as sufficient, veil and their look like exceptions.
In Welsh, ei represents /əi/. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, it represents /ɛ/ or /e/, or /ɪ/ when unstressed, before a slender consonant. In Dutch and Afrikaans, ei represents /ɛi/. In French, ei represents /ɛ/, as in seiche. In Hepburn romanization of the Japanese language it is used to transcribe the sound /eː/.
Words in the set that had ENE /iː/ (Middle English /eː/) are mostly spelled ee (meet, green, etc.), with a single e in monosyllables (be, me) or followed by a single consonant and a vowel letter (these, Peter), sometimes ie or ei (believe, ceiling), or irregularly (key, people).
The result is that English spelling patterns vary considerably in the degree to which they follow rules. For example, the letters ee almost always represent / iː / (e.g., meet), but the sound can also be represented by the letters e, i and y and digraphs ie, ei, or ea (e.g., she, sardine, sunny, chief, seize, eat).
Spelling may also be useful to distinguish in written language between homophones ... beach, bee, deceit, people, key, keyed, field (hygiene), amoeba, ...
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In Welsh, the digraph ll fused for a time into a ligature.. A digraph (from Ancient Greek δίς (dís) 'double' and γράφω (gráphō) 'to write') or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
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