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How did English spelling end up so... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 24 26 October 2009 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Was it this one? The Chaos Extrait tiré de "The Chaos" de G. Noist Trenité 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. 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. Finally, which rhymes with enough - Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6164 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 10 of 24 26 October 2009 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wonder how much time is wasted on learning English spellings for the average person. If something like Spanish was the universal language it would save so much time.
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 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5967 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 24 26 October 2009 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It could also have been this:
Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead-- For goodness' sake, don't call it "deed"! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt). If it's any consolation to non-native English writers, native ones also have a terrible time with correct spelling. In fact, the more I read in foreign languages, the worse my English spelling becomes! And with decades of English study behind me, I too have trouble saying these verses out loud! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5967 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 24 26 October 2009 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To continue my previous post: A knock at the front door prevented me from citing my source of the above stanza, and if I don't do this, I won't sleep. So, for the record, I got this from Steven Pinker's very lively and informative book, The Language Instinct, chapter 6, "The Sounds of Silence"; he got it from David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and he got it from George Bernard Shaw. A complicated chain of citation, for sure! (or, for Shaw? ouch! that was bad!)
I am going to move my car down the street and turn off the house lights now, so this does not happen again. Priorities are priorities. By the way, I LOVE the other poem! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6702 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 13 of 24 27 October 2009 at 1:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes. Then one fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese, You may find a lone mouse or a whole nest of mice, But the plural of house is houses, not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen? The cow in the plural may be cows or kine, But a bow if repeated is never called bine, And the plural of vow is vows, never vine. If I speak of a foot and you show me your feet, And I give you a boot would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth, and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth? If the singular’s this and the plural is these, Should the plural of kiss ever be nicknamed keese? Then one may be that and three would be those, Yet hat in the plural would never be hose, And the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother, and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren, Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim, So the English, I think, you all will agree, Is the queerest language you ever did see. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6164 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 14 of 24 27 October 2009 at 2:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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However one thing that English doesn't have which makes it easier is the lack of masculine and feminine types of 'the' and 'a's, unlike French.
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| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5521 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 15 of 24 27 October 2009 at 11:06am | IP Logged | |||||
As I've argued elsewhere, I don't think this has to be a difficulty at all. If, insead of learning, "langue, feminine" you just learn a few sentences using that word, it will come naturally. In the end, gender is just another feature of the word, think of the article as the first two (or so) letters of the word. As usual, I may be biased, because we have grammatical gender in Swedish, but I think it all depends on HOW you learn it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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