Swapping 'ie' to 'ei'. In this case 'Weiner' (wrong, someone who is crying) instead of 'Wiener' (correct, a type of sausage). One I've seen the other day is 'Kreigsmarine' instead of 'Kriegsmarine'.
Anyone knows why this happens?
Many German words contain an "elongated i" which is written as 'ie', but still sounds like 'e' in English, just a little drawn out and more pronounced.
In contrast, English has words like 'weird' which has an 'ei' construct in it but a pronunciation somewhat similar to what 'i' would sound like in German. Funny enough, in German 'ei' would be read like an English speaker would pronounce the letter 'i'.
So with the pronunciations more or less swapped, I guess, for an English speaker who heard the pronunciation of words like "Wiener", the spelling of the 'i' before the 'e' might feel counterintuitive, and they might, intentionally or not, "correct" it while typing.
Because ie is pronounced aye in English, and eeeee in German.
And ei is pronounced eeeee in English, and aye in German.
Grief? Tier? Thief?
https://onelook.com/?w=*ie*&scwo=1&sswo=1&ssbp=1
Not sure I'd be in a rush to say "aye" was the default pronunciation. At best it may be marginally the single most common one.
(*) meaning the number of dictionaries the word is found in, not frequency of usage.
No it's not. English spelling is irregular enough that I'm sure something is pronounced that way, but all the examples I can think of are either like "d(ay)" ("dei", "eight", "weigh", "veil"), like "b(e i)t" ("reiterate", "deity", "being", "weird", "deceit"), like "(I)" ("either", "neither", "height"), like "p(i)n" ("foreign", "sovereign"), or like "wh(e)re" ("their", "heir").
Edit: "stein"/"skein" maybe? I'm not sure if those should be like "st(ee)r" or "st(ai)n".
Edit: "seize", so there is in fact something that's pronounced that way.
> Because ie is pronounced aye in English
Neither is that: like "b(ee)": "wield", "thief", like "wh(y e)lk": "science", like "s(ee e)lk": "sapient", "salient", "orient", "sierra", "siesta". Actually, I can't think of any cases where "ie" is pronounced like "aye"(/"d(ay)"), either.
Just going through the alphabet:
die, lie, pie, tie, vie
science, cried, denied, diet, quiet, electrified, fried, justified, qualified, relied, satisfied, society, terrified, variety
Those are all pronounced like "dye", not "day"/"aye".
> science, diet, quiet, ...
That has a "eh" (like "bet") between the "I" and the "n".
> cried, denied, ...
Again, that's "dye", not "day"/"aye".
(Also I wasn't counting contractions of words ending in "-y" + a suffix, since that seemed clearly unrelated to the German loanword process, but that's more of YMMV thing.)
Edit: wait, you were pronouncing "aye" like "I", weren't you? I assumed not since it makes more sense to use, well, "I" for that. Or even "eye". Bloody accents, and bloody six monophthongs and two offglides packed into five(-ish) letters.
Although that doesn't cover "ee", and "science", "diet", "quiet", etc still aren't examples (the "I" is the pronunciation only of "i", with "e" producing a subsequent "t(e)ch" sound.
There's a rhyme they teach children who are learning to read, "I before E except after C".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_before_E_except_after_C
No matter what extra verses they add, there's still plenty of exceptions. English spelling is not consistent no matter how many rules you add to it.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/
Edit: also the relationship between pronunciation, spelling and meaning is less architectural and more archeological as English developed in the nexus of at least two divergent language groups and reflects pragmatic choices and new development that lead to the appearance of inconsistency from the outside.
I don't see how it's any different to gendered articles in German not really having much of a logical basis to them or kanji readings in Japanese just being something you learn on a case by case basis. I'm only talking about languages I have personal experience with; I'm sure there are others that could be commented on.
Roughly as close as the German Ei (noun) comes to the English ie in piej off, but not that far off. So it's kind of symmetric. Makes me wonder if there are any English words where we Germans are prone to do that flip?
https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
Eisenhower (US President). Ai-suhn-hau-ur
VS
Riesling (grape variety). Ree-sluhng
But, the sounds of individual vowels in German are different than English. I think the below is correct (based on the 2 years of German I took in college 20+ years ago, so YMMV)…
German short I = English short I
German long I = English long E
German short E = English short E
German long E = a sound that English doesn't have