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Author Topic: Poem of English Pronunciation  (Read 13298 times)

wolf.b

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Poem of English Pronunciation
« on: November 16, 2007, 09:59 PM »
I have found several publications of this funny poem on the web: "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité aka Charivarius (1870-1946)
  • I give this link: Pronunciation Help?, because it mentions the origin of the poem.
  • Here you can find the same poem with downloadable *.rm files (most likely sound). There is also a link for getting a compatible player on that site. I have not tested the player myself and can not comment on it.
  • English pronunciation same poem and more like it.
The Chaos

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!!!

Who is up to the challenge to read it aloud?


Greetings
Wolf
Schön wär's, wenn's schön wär!

cranioscopical

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2007, 10:15 PM »
I can pronounce it but I certainly can't defend it.

It's a bit fishy, as Shaw would have it.

Spoiler
to pronounce "ghoti"
use:
"gh" from "laugh"
"o" from "women"
"ti" from "nation"


 ;)

Deozaan

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #2 on: November 16, 2007, 11:13 PM »
I've heard that ghoti thing before, but the way I pronounce the "wo" in "women" sounds more like the vowel in "wet", not "wit."

So "ghoti" = fesh.

cranioscopical

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #3 on: November 17, 2007, 09:35 AM »
Ti! I won't tell if you don't.

Darwin

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2007, 09:42 AM »
Brilliant! I know quite a few ESL teachers and a lot more ESL students. I'm not sure if they'll appreciate this or not  :o, but I'll have fun watching the fireworks  :P

JennyB

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #5 on: November 17, 2007, 11:23 AM »
I first came across it on this site

What is Regular English Pronunciation?

Regular English Pronunciation (REP) is an artificial accent of English - perhaps the first 'designer' accent of any existing language. The aims of REP are to provide a pronunciation of written English that is highly intelligible, easy to learn, and logically connected to the current spelling of English. Let's take these in turn:
 
Aim-1. Highly intelligible
REP aims to maintain as great a percentage of existing pronunciations as possible, compatible with Aim-2 and Aim-3. In fact over 75% of REP pronunciations of words in a typical running text are the same as standard pronunciations.

Aim-2. Easy to learn
REP aims to have as few pronunciation rules (letter-to-sound rules) as possible, compatible with Aim-1 and Aim-3. In fact REP version 1.01 consists of just 100 rules and 100 exceptions, well within the capability of a learner to remember.

Aim-3. Logical
REP will be as logically connected to the spelling as possible, compatible with Aim-1 and Aim-2. In fact REP is 100% logical but requires spelling to be parsed into morphological units before a pronunciation is assigned.

An interesting idea that makes more sense than simplified spelling.
If you don't see how it can fail -
you haven't understood it properly.

Darwin

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #6 on: November 17, 2007, 11:29 AM »
Please, don't get me started on simplified spelling...  >:(

tomos

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #7 on: November 17, 2007, 07:20 PM »
Please, don't get me started on simplified spelling...  >:(

what spelling do you use in Canada - like in US or UK - or is there a Canadian spelling?
Tom

tomos

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #8 on: November 17, 2007, 07:35 PM »
An interesting idea that makes more sense than simplified spelling.

but has it a chance ? :) imagine trying to pronounce every fourth word different :-\

I suppose if you get em young...
here in (Pfalz) Germany I find it interesting the the local accent(s) are so strong (dialects) that people say they learn their first foreign language on going to school - hochdeutsch = "high german". They then change between them like different languages. interesting as well that the dialects are basically not written as such - no spelling rules at all - way-hay 8)

I always have to imagine people with extremely strong.. say scottish accents turning around and speaking to someone in BBC english!
Tom

cranioscopical

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #9 on: November 17, 2007, 07:56 PM »
I always have to imagine people with extremely strong.. say scottish accents turning around and speaking to someone in BBC english!
Isn't it delightful when that kind of thing really happens?
I recall being served fish and chips by a gentleman whose appearance and location led me to expect him to be Chinese. He addressed me in a broad Glaswegian accent.

Canadian spelling is mainly the same as British with some (few) American spellings for example, we have car tires, not car tyres. The preferred ending for 'ise' words is 'ize', so we don't sympathise, we sympathize.

For myself, I find that rotating between Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. pretty well guarantees that I'll make errors in all three  ;)

wolf.b

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #10 on: November 17, 2007, 08:08 PM »
I grew up in the neighborhood of Pfalz, Germany namely Saarland, Germany. And I remember that as a child, my teachers were always trying to get us to speak proper German. They did that by telling us that my local dialect sounds stupid and uneducated. In Saarland, some schools teach french as the first foreign language, which makes it the third language that I learned before I ever learned any English. After having worked in the UK for more than ten years, I now regard my dialect no more stupid than eg the swiss dialect, (a variation on the German language) that is even spoken on their national television. I have worked in Switzerland as well and know from personal experience that even lectures are held in their dialect.

Anyway, I would miss it when local dialects or Scottish, Irish, South African, Australian and so on, disappeared. It adds so much colour (mind the "u") to the language. I have found that "Queens English" is invaluable for an German in Birmingham, Huddersfield or Ashington (all UK), given the fact that you want to communicate. I remember my first day in the UK, when I could not answer the question "Would you like a cup of tea?" because I understood not a single word of it.


Wolf
Schön wär's, wenn's schön wär!

Darwin

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #11 on: November 17, 2007, 11:26 PM »
Yup, Tom, I can confirm what Chris says about Canadian spelling - right down to being cursed with the certainty of making a mistake somewhere (witness my attempts to use "ise" and "ize" correctly  :o). Ah well, makes life interesting! For myself, I find "colour" without the "u" rather bland - colourless you might say! Just my little quirk, though. I imagine there are Americans who get annoyed in the other direction - I suspect that my wife is one of them!

Cavalcader

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Re: Poem of English Pronunciation
« Reply #12 on: November 18, 2007, 10:22 AM »
It's good to see that poem getting the attention it deserves -- it's very creative! I found this introduction attached to it a few years ago:

Multinational personnel at NATO headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language -- until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud.

Another one I came across some time back, not mentioned yet in this thread, is (re)posted as "So you wanna learn English".

For anyone wanting guidance through the madness, there's a great page called Common Errors in English by Paul Brians of Washington State University. It's quite thorough!
My Linguistic Profile:
  40% General American English
  30% Yankee
  20% Dixie

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?