Language & Grammar discussion

Here is a poem about learning English.



English Pronunciation
September 5, 2007 by quotes
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

English Pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité

Well done, Gabi!

That's a good one Kitty. I'd seen a similar poem before, but much shorter.

And I always thought that ague rhymed with plague and Alexander Haig (words I picked completely at random, funnily enough).

What a splendid poem! It tempted me to mispronounce "croquet" (with the accent incorrectly on the final syllable). And I had never encountered, "Foeffer" But how does anybody - native-English-speakers or others - learn how to speak this language? It's a miracle

Anthony D wrote: "... It tempted me to mispronounce "croquet" (with the accent incorrectly on the final syllable)... "

cro-KAY is how it is pronounced in Masachusetts (and in the rest of the US, I think) where I learned the game. How do you pronounce it, Anthony?

and "foeffer" was new to me too.

ETA: although there is a discussion here about the spelling (!), perhaps feoffer.

http://www.proz.com/forum/lighter_sid...

I think in the USA there is a tendency to attempt a French pronunciation for what were originally French words hence Bernard, chauffeur, garage and of course croquet. In the UK, even Francophiles like me (there aren't too many of us)tend to Anglicise such words with the stress on the first syllable. It's probably a residual zenophobia. My parents never ate garlic for similar reasons.

Anthony D wrote: "My parents never ate garlic for similar reasons. "

*gasp* no bouillabaisse?

You obviously have no idea how dreadful British food was in the 1950s!
This calamitous nadir, however, had the joyful result that British food rose to be excellent and radically cosmopolitan. The nation's favourite food is now alleged to be "chicken tikka mosalla", or more broadly "curry".
Unfortunately, in the process, some genuinely good British foods - "spotted dick", "dead man's leg", even "toad in the hole" - have rather fallen by the wayside.
Mind you, as I write, I notice that the very names we chose for some of our foods did betray a certain negative attitude to cuisine.

Spotted dick sounds like a social disease.

Contracted from Toad in the hole by the sound of it.

And then he dies and the dead man's leg falls off!

Never heard of that one, Anthony.

Yes me neither, toad in the hole, spotted dick, bubble and squeak yes I think I know those, but dead man's leg sounds rather ghastly.

Wikipedia to the rescue: it's a rolled-up desert made from suet pudding and jam, which is put into an old shirt sleeve or pant leg and then steamed and resembles the gruesome thing... bwa-hahaha!

(still sounds ghastly)

What an awful way to drum up curiosity for a relatively humdrum dessert, bet it was a sensationalist gig to boost sales or something, either that or an accident, to give it the 'what the?' factor.

Woolfie wrote: "What an awful way to drum up curiosity for a relatively humdrum dessert, bet it was a sensationalist gig to boost sales."

I suspect "dead man's leg" has its origins in the "school dinners" that were instituted (I think)after the Second World War to provide minimum nutrition to the poor (and also to people like me). These were at first very dire, and invited much schoolboy and schoolgirl humour. "Toad in the Hole" and some of the others however are quite acceptable names and found in reputable English cookbooks.

I believe they are pretty similar. Long before cholesterol was discovered to be bad (or even discovered at all) my mother decided not to cook such things, so I only ever got them at school.

"Toad in the hole" however is a totally different experience. We get it at home to this day.