"What's that?" said the explorer, pointing at an interesting variety of tree.
The bemused Native utters something.
The explorer writes it down.
The explorer asks for the names of other native plant and animal life.
Only later does it transpire that said Native has pulled a fast one. Now it's too late to remove the new words that translate to "A Big Tree", "Big Tweety Bird", "Your Finger", "You Stupid Gringo", "Who Farted", "Vagina of Goddess" and "I go home now".
We already know that "Yucatan" means "What do you want" in the native language.

Note that the CIE examples all have a pair of vowel sounds, rather than the single vowel sounds quoted in the CEI examples. This seems to be the important difference, as one merely puts down the two vowels sounded in the first set.

About the only exceptions to I before E (one sound) are seize and weird. It may be argued that because of the influence of the R that weird comes out with two distinct vowel sounds. Perhaps it depends on how fast you say it.

Here I quite disagree. The way I was taught did exactly that, and with near-perfect reliability -- at the very least insofar as the word is of regular spelling, which is the great bulk of all the hundred fifty thousand or so English words in regular modern use -- a fraction of the total in the Oxford English Dictionary. It usually delivers on the weirdies as well. The method is Phonics, and it made a superb speller of me by the third grade; I could visualize a word's spelling as I spoke it.

What's Phonics, essentially? It's a course of study that rehearses all the ways English comes up with to spell a given noise, and which English words use which way. When all's said and done, spelling becomes simple for the Phonics student, who can confidently "sound words out," and reading and garnering meaning from reading become very pleasurable, and he can readily navigate and be entertained by such Seussian constructions as "The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough."

It's not that English has no system of orthography; it's that it has two: one for the Germanic-group words and one for the Latinate. Add those loan-words kept in their original languages' spellings to stir the pot, and you have the current farrago.

Only slightly off topic, the difficulty of English besides strange spelling....
There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is "UP."
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP ,and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends and we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old cars.

At other times the little word has a real special meaning. People stir up trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.
To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this up is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP !
To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP . When it rains, it wets UP the earth.
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP

One could go on & on, but I'll wrap it UP , for now my time is UP , so .... time to shut UP .....!

Oh...one more thing:! What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night?

U P
:D

If it's so freaking hard, how come my 5yo just read a new book straight through without errors which contained the words through, straight, thought, sight and night? believe me, his "sight words" are 2, 3 and 4 letters.

Patterns? Do I hear something about pattern recognition? No surely not!

Of course he's a genius, but if a 5yo can deal with all these silent letters, inconsistencies and rule breakers then it's a bit wussie to claim that indirect spelling is holding intelligent people back.

/proud of our 5yo
//worried about what else he might have read when we were lulled into thinking that he wasn't interested in reading....

5 year olds can latch on to anything in a snap. So can 15 year olds, but only if it doesn't have anything to do with school. 50 year olds pick their battles and challanges.:haha:

The bold text in the above quote is interesting because it supports my original point even as the surrounding text tries to argue against it.

How much better would Phonics be if all English words had a regular spelling? For the irregular words, no teaching method can help with the spelling of such words as "colonel", "ptarmigan", "forecastle", "lieutenant" (British pronunciation as "leftenant") and other oddities when such words are encountered for the first time in spoken English.

Sight recognition of words is not the same as spelling them correctly. Get your 5yo to spell these words. Does he get them all right or does he misspell any of them?

The support for that point is not very strong, however; that is why I said at the very least -- it'll do that well, but that isn't the limit of its usefulness.

To make English spelling phonetically consistent a outrance will call for an alphabet of about forty characters -- something like, say, Unifon or Omniglot.

I'm a living example of the effectiveness of a course of phonics, Kingswood, even if you've never heard of it. My elementary school class got phonics, while my younger brothers' class a few years behind did not and it took their spelling a looong time to catch up with mine; basically we could spell, they couldn't. Not like us. Phonics is why I'm a good writer and copyeditor and tw, to cite an obvious example, is not.

This is true. It is also true that adding this many new letters to the alphabet (and omitting redundant letters like q and x) would have acceptance issues with the general public. Another difficulty with a 40-character alphabet would be the complexity of the keyboard that would be required.

Yet there are grounds for considering the addition of new letters. English has six short vowels that can take stress but only five vowel letters, so adding one vowel letter would make it possible for all short stressed vowels to be written distinctly with single letters. (The short vowel without a convenient monographic representation is the vowel in "good".) It should not be necessary to add more than one letter, and this letter could be as simple as a u with an umlaut or something: ü. Some people would object to the addition of a new letter to the alphabet (and fair enough, they would not be used to it) but other people may embrace it. ("Woohoo! We're getting umlauts!")

This does not mean that any new letters would be required. Instead, English is more likely to make do with digraphs even after any reform that may take place.

My formal education did not involve phonics, I just had a good memory for spelling. (I remember spelling Latinate words of 10 letters or so correctly in first grade.)

That's about what I figured.

I believe my memory for spelling is primarily visual, as it relies heavily on a process of visualization -- the word has to look right. Which is a regrettably circular sentence, but it seems the only one that answers to a simple and long established habit.

What's wrong with "forecastle"?
It's not four castles.
It's not for the castle.
It's foreward or forecastle.
The spelling helps explain the intent or meaning. Change the spelling and you've changed the meaning. :rtfm:

Its pronunciation is not what you may expect from the spelling. It's pronunciation sounds like "foxel". (It may be pronounced as spelt as well, but such a pronunciation would probably mark you as a landlubber.) There is a variant spelling "fo'c'sle" that is close to the nautical pronunciation.