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.
Fe0ffer 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
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Teaching requires many different traits, and yes, knowledge is one of them. Patience, understanding, empathy, and sense of humour are others. The ability to pronounce obscure words found in a poem on the internet is not.
However, the ability to learn new things is very important. If you think that everyone who has ever taught a subject was familiar with every tiny bit of minutia that accompanies it, you’re mistaken to the point of absurdity.
So someone who teaches just learned 19 new things. 19! That’s 19 things they can now pass on to students. How is that wrong? Why would that make someone feel ashamed? Because someone else hid behind the anonymity of the internet and told him it should? That’s pathetic.
Also, as far as I know, there is no such debate on whether or not you should capitalize after an exclamation mark. Shame on you.
Katt wrote:
I’m very serious, if you can’t pronounce ALL of the words you should not be allowed to teach anything to anyone!
This is obviously an exaggeration. Being or not being able to pronounce all the difficult words in the poem has no bearing on whether or not you should be allowed to teach math to anyone, or French to anyone, or even reading and writing English to first-grade children.
This said, it is regrettable that the comments on this article, which was meant as an amusing example of how little English orthography and pronunciation are related to each other, has degenerated into a flame war.
The discussion’s even more breathtaking than the exercise itself. I would agree with Katt, being a kinda perfectionist myself and tending to criticise language teachers for the slightest mistake. However, it’s not about teaching actually. You might be a perfect speaker, *pronouncer* without the ability to deliver your flawless knowledge to your students, so what’s the point in being such then? Being a language teacher unquestionably requires exceptional language proficiency, but it’s just one component of the whole set of skills which are even more important, I guess.
The real name of this poem is Chaos: A Poem. You should fix that.
That woz phun!
English is not the easiest language to master (There is rule for everything and then an exception to the rule) But then again German (phonetic) has so much grammar it is a nightmare, unless you learn it as a child and even then the ‘Sie’ and Du’ again is a nightmare. The main thing is that people TRY to learn different words in different languages and make the effort to communicate. Guss Got.
Question: how does “four” rhyme with “Arkansas”?
I love the poem “English Pronunciation”, I wonder how many teenagers would be able to pronounce half of the poem.
Angela: That question has already been answered, but there are so many comments already, it’s understandable that you might not have read them all:
In a non-rhotic accent (as in “BBC English” but not in most US accents) the consonant r is not pronounced word-finally at the pause (or before a consonant inside a word), and that means that “foh” rhymes with “ah-k’n-soh”.
Jesus Christ! For someone who doesn’t know all these words it will be really hard! Some words can hava almost the same structure but not the same pronunciation. I’m Brazilian and I got some dificults with reading it aloud. But I promise: I’ll try again and I’ll do it correctly.
I managed through the list, but I had to sing it to do it!
Hey, I’m an English teacher (Canadian, with very clear voice/accent). I came across this post a few weeks ago, and just couldn’t resist recording myself (anonymously,that is!) reading the poem aloud and uploading to YouTube (I saw a few requests, above). Yes, others have already done this, but the difference is that I have included the full scrolling transcript so you can read along, to check your pronunciation. Hope it helps someone out there!! Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5myI9TDFDw
@Sarah…because it’s pronounced ArkanSAW….
Surely all the “ooh does it rhyme, does it not” back-and-forthing serves to highlight is the extra dimension to the complexities of the language, in all its dialects and derivations?
Oh noes! Someone said people from Arkansas are “Arkansawyers”? And they claimed there were from Arkansas? Aye-yi-yi.
signed,
a native Arkansan [Ark-kan-san] from Arkansas [Ark-an-saw] who grew up 10 miles from the Arkansas [Ark-an-saw] River in Little Rock… but who will be ok with being called an “Arkan-sassy-an”
I’m not going to weigh in on all the absurdities of which English speaking nation speaks “better” English–since English has ALWAYS been a melange (!) of other languages. That’s one of the pure joys of teaching it, to me–that our poets can contrast Latinate/French multisyllabic with the thwack of Anglo-Saxon/Norse consonants–something that reaches its apogee in Macbeth’s “this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red”
(A pairing that that Melville matches many a time in Moby Dick.)
The beauty of English to me is that it’s a language of many languages, and variations in pronunciation are part of that. The poem is clever and a lovely celebration of this, not a contest.
I AM wondering if there can possibly be a “correct” pronunciation of a word like “Terpsichore,” given that it’s an anglicization of Ancient Greek? It’s utterly fatuous to claim that the way one pronounces “Oedipus” is a sign of how well one speaks ENGLISH!!!
If anyone wants to hear it delivered in an approximation of received pronunciation, new youtube video here: http://youtu.be/hJeRIcj5Fb8
English is not the easiest language to master, indeed! However, it is the easiest language to use. That’s why nearly everywhere local pidgin is understood, and enough for trade. What else?
Let’s speak Global!!
Wow! That was awesome! I actually did better than I thought it would.
Did I mis al-u-min-knee-um in this list?
Amanda: of course there may not be a “correct” way of saying Terpsichore in English, but there is an established one (as with all Greek deities and other characters). Knowing how to pronounce Socrates, Aristophanes, et al, is more a function of general knowledge than anything strictly linguistic. But then that’s true of ALL English pronunciation, which is kind of the point of the poem.
Many years ago, I worked as a paralegal and it wasn’t until I’d been at it for about 3 months that I first heard someone else utter the word “antecedent” out loud. Of course it’s not a word in common usage but it’s VERY common in legal jargon, and I’d used it for one reason or another in writing probably every day until then. I had invented my own incorrect pronunciation and stress, and it took me a while to realise that this had been the topic of some laughter in the office.
The way it is spelled bears very little indication of how to pronounce it correctly and although I was well educated and informed (both generally and technically), I could still get it wrong.
On a different scale, I have a unique way of pronouncing “worry” which has been the subject of a great deal of leg-pulling throughout my adult life – sometimes I manage to correct myself but more often than not, I come out with this strange sound that does not fit in with the rest of my speech patterns and frankly, makes me sound a bit stupid. But that’s the result of many years of linguistic abuse, not lack of knowledge how to pronounce it properly.
The “French man” mentioned above surely doesn’t speak much English.
I’m French, and I had no pb reading the poem aloud, except for the few words I have never met before. That is the point with the English language: there is no way to guess how to pronounce a word when you have never heard it before, as pronounciation options are multiple and sometimes illogical according to the general rule.
The fact that “bass” and “base” sound alike has no logical exponation, no linguistic reason and is impossible to guess unless you have heard it before, the general rule in this case being that a vowel between 2 single consonnants should diphtongue. The “exception to the rule” situation is a very familiar one in French, where, as a kid, you have to learn all the grammar rules + all the correspondent exceptions.
This poem shows clearly why language teaching/learning should focus first on hearing and pronouncing, and get to writing and spelling much later, just like how children learn their mother language.
Now does the poem take regional accents into account? That’s a question. “Law” or “drawer” are not pronounced the same way in GB than in the US (“You say ee-ther and I say eye-ther… let’s call the whole thing on”)
Could someone tell me where the author is from according to the rhyming he’s used?
JfP
To have to communicate teaches us so much!
Jose,
The poem’s author was Dutch but it’s clear that his expectations are that the text should be read in an educated middle/upper class south-eastern English accent of the first decades of the 20th century. Some of the rhymes and scansions simply don’t work otherwise.
One rhyme in the longer version of the poem especially stands out, where he expects the reader to rhyme cross with sauce – I can’t imagine anyone outside Royal circles could do that nowadays with a straight face without wincing.
There are some rhymes which exclude vast numbers of people and require attention, such as rhyming chair with mayor, or four with Arkansas – no dialect/accent from further than 100 miles from Oxford would naturally manage that.
The text also explictly states that parquet should “exactly rhyme” khaki – that may have been true 100 years ago but all educated Brits now pronounce the former as par-kay (as in okay without the O) rather than par-key (as in what you use to open a lock), and the latter word is no longer car-key but car-ki (VERY short i) and in natural modern educated speech the two words absolutely do not rhyme.
Oh and I agree, French is not a great deal easier to learn to pronounce or to transcribe (I am a fan of the French televised annual Great Dictation in which even professional writers and Academicians rarely achieve a 100% score). And so a Frenchman would be used to picking up clues from context and experience about how to read dificult words – and given that the difficulty of many tricky English words lies in their French origins, a Frenchman may even have an advantage… (I am completely bilingual)
@José from Paris: The author was a Dutch teacher of English who lived before WWII. I suppose that he used the “Queen’s English” (or maybe “King’s English”) of his time.
Richard (Feb 7th) I am from more than 100 miles north of Oxford and automatically rhyme four with Arkansas as did the rest of my family
I am fourteen years old and I can pronounce every word there. Not all teenagers have no brains. Cheers!
To Jose from Paris: “bass” rhymes with “base” only if it’s not a fish
To Jeanne and Jose from Paris: “Bass rhymes with base only if it’s not a fish,”but bass rhymes with ass otherwise. LOL
I am Indian graduate. i could read aloud most of the words, except for the few i had not know before.
It is true that English is hard to reach as there i s no standard rule, the reason being it spoken in different ways and has local influence on it.
I dont think anyone cam claim one to be a correct pronounciation.
I guess Indian languages like Sanskrit and Hindi are much easier to learn and right, as there is no ambigiity in reading, writing or grammer.
WoW