![]() The standardized spellings these words ended up with are fairly arbitrary. In Middle English or Early Modern English, before our spelling became standardized, you might encounter spellings like "mainteyne" and "deceave". So the verb "maintain" either had or developed a diphthong in the stressed second syllable when it was imported into English, but the use of the specific digraph "ai" to spell this sound was arbitrary: it could just as well have been spelled "maintein", or even "maintean" with the sound of the "ea" in "great". Northern Old French developments of -ie- ) Through analogy Middle English forms suggesting pronunciations withĬlose ē and with ī probably reflect respectively Anglo-Norman and Subjunctive -tiegne, -teigne (although with much mixture of forms ![]() The English forms probably partly reflect stem variation in Oldįrench, where stress on the stem in parts of the paradigm gives e.g.ģrd singular present indicative -tient, 3rd singular present In any case, the second digraph "ai" in "maintain" is not even etymological, but secondary: according to the OED, the French source word was spelled variously as "meintenir," "maintenir" and "maynteigner." The OED entry on "maintain" further states: We also write "deception", "deceive" and "deceit", and "reception","receive", and "receipt". It might seem more logical to you, but that's never been a successful argument in changing English spelling*. ![]() There is no rule that related segments of words have to be spelled with the same sequence of letters. ![]()
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