[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[AEF]

On Feb 12, 4:50 pm, hel... at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article
> <30cb251a-22f9-43a5-84c5-741ea5209... at hl5g2000vbb.googlegroups.com>, AEF
>
> <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> writes:
> > disc - CD, frisbee (flying disc), phonograph record, DVD, videodisc,
> > optical disc (or disk), abbreviation for discount, disc brakes, Blu-
> > ray disc
>
> > disk - disk drive; image of a celestial body as visible in a
> > telescope, or in the case of the Sun or Moon, also in the naked eye,
> > and in the case of a star, which is something too small to be seen as
> > a normal disk, a diffraction disk (in naked eye or telescope); slipped
> > disk in the backbone
>
> Yes, there are rules, which vary from country to country.  But what ARE
> the rules?  Can you describe them without examples?

The only hard and fast rule of English spelling that's guaranteed to
work all the time is the following variant of the i before e rule:

It's i before e, except when it's e before i. :-D

Audio/video tends to be disc, even when adapted to computers, as in CD-
ROMs.

C followed by a is almost always pronounced like k. Caeser and Celtic
are the only exceptions I can think of. (Actually Celtic can be either
soft or hard [s or k]. In Irish English it's k (at least for the music
group "Celtic Woman") and in American basketball it's s.)

C followed by o is always with a k sound AFAIK. Same for c followed by
u.

C followed by e, i, or y is always soft, as an s, I believe. Hmmm,
even there there's an exception: words like efficient, sufficient,
omniscient, proficient, coefficient, where the c is pronounced as an
sh. In fact, this is the chief motivation for the "i before e except
after c" bit.

G followed by a, o, or u is always a hard g, with the occasional
exception of vegan, which can be pronounced soft or hard (like g or j,
respectively. Oh, and then there's the word "garage", in which the
second g is neither.)

AEF