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The doubling—and sometimes even tripling—often originates in the transition from use of one language for legal purposes to another: in Britain, from a native English term to a Latin or Law French term; in Romance-speaking countries, from Latin to the vernacular. To ensure understanding, the terms from both languages were used.
Where a single consonant separates a vowel and a silent word final e, the first vowel is 'lengthened'. Unlike the doubling rule, the consonant is not doubled when 'lengthening' is undesired. Instead, the 'magic e' is dropped (unless it indicates soft or hard c or g , then the consonant is doubled).
Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena. [3] Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as Greek, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates.
Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian, other Romance languages spoken in Italy, and Finnish. It consists in the lengthening of the initial consonant in certain contexts. It may also be called word-initial gemination or phonosyntactic consonantal gemination.
Idyl is the spelling of the word preferred in the US by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, for the same reason as the double consonant rule; idyll, the original form from Greek eidullion, is also used. jail, gaol: jail: In the UK, gaol and gaoler are used sometimes, apart from literary usage, chiefly to describe a medieval building and guard.
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In 1932 Leonard B. Wheat examined the rules and word lists found in various American elementary school spelling books. He calculated that, of the 3,876 words listed, 128 had ei or ie in the spelling; of these, 83 conformed to I-before-E, 6 to except-after-C, and 12 to sounded-like-A.
With place names this rule is not always adhered to: Sicilies and Scillies are the standard plurals of Sicily and Scilly, while Germanys and Germanies are both used. [3] Nor does the rule apply to words that are merely capitalized common nouns: P&O Ferries (from ferry). Other exceptions include lay-bys and stand-bys.