Just ran into a USian whose name is literally Lief Erickson. Lief. With ie

Are the Anglos okay

@schratze love the “I before E except after C” even though it’s one of those “rules” where there’s more exceptions than raccases where it is true

@schratze USians cannot tell "ie" and "ei" apart. All they know is eat hot chip and lei

@bean @schratze there's a character in Half-Life² named Dr Kleiner, pronounced like German ei, and anglophones almost always spell him "Kliener" because that's how they spell that sound 😭

@schratze looking at a word list of half a million words

15840 follow the rule. 5987 do not

so i guess it’s not true that there’s more exceptions. but exceptions do take up 25% of cases

@schratze to be doubly fair a lot of the ones that do not follow the rule are loanwords

@charlotte this is why this causes so much confusion in Anglos and leads them to overcorrect

@schratze and when it comes to personal names the rules get thrown out of the window entirely because some people do genuinely go by americanized versions of german-origin names

@charlotte I'm glad there are no USians who call their kids something unhinged like Mädchen. That would suck

@schratze
Pronounced mad-chin

@charlotte meydshin but yeah

@schratze @charlotte "and then the school shooter almost found my classmate and I" is grating on so many levels

@charlotte @schratze because parents really like Mads Mikkelsen and decided to give their child a shortened version of his name