Archive for the ‘Spelling’ Category

More bits and pieces that I didn’t know, had never thought about or had doubts about from The Cambridge Grammar of English:

- The reason why you don’t double the p in “developing” is because the previous vowel isn’t stressed. Ditto for “delivered” and “opener”, but lots of words ending in -l in BrE and others such as handicapped and programmed don’t follow the rule
 
- Doubling consonants when adding -ed and -ing is part of a more general rule when “a suffix beginning with a vowel is added”, e.g. -ish, -ence and –er

- The “i before e except after c” rule only counts for the /i:/ pronunciation like “brief”, so most of the “exceptions” are because other pronunciations are spelt “ei”, e.g. neighbour, weigh, reign, leisure. Real exceptions include financier, species and examples of -cy changing to -cies, e.g. democracies.
 
- The final e making the preceding stressed vowel long, e.g. hat/hate, also works for -le, hence able, fable, bible etc.
 
- The plural of bus can be buses or busses. Ditto with biased/biassed, focusing/focussing, gases/gasses.

“Is “becuase”, with its 4,950,000 hits on a famous web search engine, the commonest typo in the English language? (more…)