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In English spelling, the three letter rule (or short word rule) is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be function words such as ''I'', ''at'', ''he'', ''if'', ''of'', ''or'', etc. As a consequence of the rule, "content words" tend to have at least three letters. In particular, content words containing fewer than three phonemes may be augmented with letters which are phonetically redundant, such as ''ebb'', ''add'', ''egg'', ''inn'', ''bee'', ''awe'', ''buy'', ''owe'', etc. ==Origin== Many content words would be homographs of common function words if not for the latter's "redundant" letters: e.g. ''be/bee'', ''in/inn'', ''I/eye'', ''to/two''. Otto Jespersen, describing the phenomenon in 1909, suggested the short spelling was a marker of reduced stress. Content words always have at least one stressed syllable, whereas function words are often completely unstressed; shorter spellings help to reflect this. (Interjections such as ''ah'', ''eh'', ''lo'', ''yo'' are always stressed. Punctuation serves to isolate these elements.) In Old English, inflections increased the length of most content words in any case. Through to the seventeenth century, before English spelling was firmly settled, short forms for some content words did occur, such as ''eg'' (egg), ''ey'' (eye), ''lo'' (low), etc. Conversely, poets such as John Milton alternated between short and long forms for function words, depending on whether they occurred on or off the meter. For instance: :''So spake the false Arch-Angel, and infus'd'' :''Bad influence into th' unwarie brest'' :''Of his Associate; hee together calls,'' :''Or several one by one, the Regent Powers,'' :''Under him Regent, tells, as he was taught,'' :::(Paradise Lost, Book 5, ll. 694-698) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「three letter rule」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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