On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: >On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, David Silberstein wrote: > >#On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: ># >#>"I before E except after C, >#> Or when pronounced 'ay', as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'." ># >#Heinlein. Peirce. Sleight. Seize. Deice. Weir. Deil. >#Deity. Deis. Their. Heir. ># > > Their. > Heir. >Pronounced "ay", with the difference you'd expect before "r", and so >obeying the rule. (Note that "they" would be spelled "thei" if we >didn't have a strong prejudice against writing final "i" that has led >us to write it "y" for centuries.) Quibble: *Are* they pronounced "ay"? To my ear (here we go with pronunciation problems again), the sound is not the same as in "weigh". http://dictionary.reference.com/ indicates that they are different; "their" says "â" (a-carat) rather than "a-superscript-bar" (for "weigh"). The OED indicates different vowel sounds as well. > > Deis. >Where'd you get this one? The OED has it only as a spelling of "dais" >used in the 13th to 16th centuries. > Yup. I was using dictionary.reference.com for the above, feeling too lazy to log into my OED access, and misspellings brought up some various words with "ei" in, including the above obsolete one. That's probably a cheat as well.