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English spelling is guaranteed to confuse even those of us who have
spoken the language all our lives. Sometimes, when we find our mother tongue
difficult to understand, we say "it sounds like double Dutch."
A Dutch school teacher and author, Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité
(1870-1946), returned the compliment when he wrote a long poem, De
Chaos, first published in Amsterdam as an appendix to the fourth edition of
his schoolbook Drop Your Foreign Accent, engelsche
uitspraakoefeningen (Haarlem: H D Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1920).
In an article entitled The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos,
published by the Simplified Spelling Society in 1994, Chris Upward, of
Birmingham, England, a vice-president of the Society, wrote: "The Chaos
represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of
the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skillfully
versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine
and masculine rhymes."
Upward's scholarly review, and a complete version of The Chaos, are
displayed on the Spelling
Society website. Here are the opening lines:
Dearest
creature in creation Studying English
pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like
corpse, corps, horse and worse. I will keep you,
Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow
dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; Queer,
fair seer, hear my prayer. Pray, console your
loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sewit!
Just compare heart, hear and
heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
A poem frequently quoted on the Internet is The English Lesson.
Strangely, no-one seems to know the name of the genius who composed it. Here
it is:
The English Lesson
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox should
be oxen, not oxes. Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese, Yet
the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a
whole lot 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
pen? The cow in the plural may be cows or kine, But the plural of vow is
vows, not vine. And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet, But I
give a boot...would a pair be beet? If one is a tooth, and a whole set is
teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? If the singular is
this, and the plural is these, Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be
kese? Then one may be that, and three be those, Yet the plural of hat
would never be hose. We speak of a brother, and also of brethren, But
though we say mother, we never say methren. The masculine pronouns are he,
his and him, But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim. So our English,
I think you will agree, Is the trickiest language you ever did see.
I take it you already know of tough, and bough and cough and
dough? Others may stumble, but not you on hiccough, through, slough and
though. Well done! And now you wish, perhaps To learn of less familiar
traps? 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) A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both
in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there, Nor dear
and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose
-- Just look them up -- and goose and choose, And cork and work and card
and ward And font and front and word and sword. And do and go, then thwart
and cart. Come, come, I've hardly made a start. A dreadful language: Why,
man alive, I'd learned to talk when I was five. And yet to write it, the
more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
[An alternative version quotes the final couplet as: And yet to write
it, the more I sigh, I'll not learn how 'til the day I die.]
One of the many websites displaying The English Lesson on the Internet
comments "Our queer language: so you think French is hard?" Another lists it
under the heading "Hints on Pronunciation for Foreigners." A Danish site shows
the headline "A dreadful language? English. Engelsk
sprogforbistring."
On a St. Louis, Missouri (US) website, Gary V Deutschmann has revised the
final couplet to read "So the ENGLISH, I Think, You All Will AGREE/Is The
Most WONDERFUL LANGUAGE You Ever Did SEE." And on an Ohio page it appears as
"Let's be more tolerant of he and she/ And of all of those who have
diffi-cul-tee!"
Summing up, the puzzle of English pronunciation is admirably described in
this final couplet of the first stanza of The English Lesson:
So our English, I think you will agree Is the trickiest language you
ever did see.
Eric Shackle is now an 83 year old web author, and his writings have appeared all around the world. He has written a lovely and funny book, which he has published on the net for you to peruse. Hop over to Eric Shackle's eBook and have a read. A lovely way to pass that coffee break time, reading a well-written book.
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