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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, and we’ll be honest with you, we
struggled with parts of it.
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!!!
You’ve been reading “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité, written
nearly 100 years ago in 1922, designed to demonstrate the irregularity
of English spelling and pronunciation. There’s also a video of the poem being read out should you want some help on couple of the more unusual words, above. With many thanks to The Poke. Thanks to Jared for sending me this. Related:
There are plenty of challenging reads out there, like Finnegans Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow.
But those are nursery rhymes compared to the Voynich Manuscript, a
mysterious text full of strange botanical drawings and an unknown script
that has put scholars and code breakers in a frenzy since it was last discovered by Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.
While interested readers have, for some time, had access to
photos of the pages, the manuscript itself is locked away in Yale
University’s rare books collection. But that will soon change. As Ben Guarino reports at The Washington Post, Spanish publisher Siloé
has been granted permission to make copies of the book, and will
produce 898 “clones” of the manuscript, reproducing each water stain,
worm hole and strange illustration. So far, about 300 pre-orders of the
reproductions have been purchased at around $8,000 each.
The idea is to get the manuscript into the hands of more
libraries and more scholars in the hopes of cracking the code. “Touching
the Voynich is an experience,” Juan Jose Garcia, editor at Siloé, which
spent 10 years trying to get permission from Yale to reproduce the
manuscript tells Agence France-Presse. “It’s
a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the
first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to
describe.”
The origin of the manuscript is not completely known. Radio
carbon dating places the paper in the 15th century, though the writing
may have taken place in the 16th century as well, according to Yale University.
It is thought that the book may be the work of English scientist and philosopher Roger Bacon, and that the manuscript was once in the possession of John Dee,
an astrologer, mathematician and polymath that advised both Mary I
and Elizabeth I. The book eventually made it into the hands of Emperor
Rudolph II of Germany before being passed along, fading out of history
until Voynich found it in a Jesuit college near Rome.
Since then, scholars have attempted to
figure out the meaning of the strange 240-page text. The first part
includes 113 drawings of botanical specimens that don’t seem to
correspond with any known plants, Yale University writes. The second
section contains astral charts and drawings. Other sections contain
drawings of female nudes near strange tubes, descriptions of medicinal
herbs and long stretches of indecipherable writing in an unknown
alphabet.
“The Voynich Manuscript has led some of the smartest people down
rabbit holes for centuries,” Bill Sherman of the Folger Shakespeare
Library, who curated an exhibit on the book told Sadie Dingfelder at The Washington Post. “I
think we need a little disclaimer form you need to sign before you look
at the manuscript, that says, ‘Do not blame us if you go crazy.’ ”
Some people claim the whole thing is an elaborate hoax or that
the language is complete nonsense. But a 2013 paper examining the
strange language determined that the distribution of the unique alphabet
and words is consistent with a real language. Then, in 2014, a professor from England claimed he’d deciphered 14 words in the text, including the names of the plants hellebore, juniper and coriander.
According to the AFP, the Yale library gets thousands of emails
per month from codebreakers who think they have figured out the text.
Rene Zandbergen who runs a blog dedicated to the manuscript claims that 90 percent of the rare book library’s online users are accessing digital images of the manuscript.
It will take Siloé about 18 months to begin producing the
facsimile editions. But for those who cannot wait that long or don't
want to pony up thousands of dollars for an unreadable book, Yale University Press is releasing its own version of the Voynich Manuscript in November, which includes critical essays and fold-out sections of the text for $50. By Jason Daley
Languages are ever changing,
mixing and mutating, and sometimes they give birth to new ones. Sanskrit gave
birth to Hindi and others; Latin is ancestor to a set of languages including
Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian; more recently, Afrikaans came
from Dutch. But how about English? What will it give birth to?
Three important factors linguists
have identified in languages giving birth to other languages are time,
separation, and contact.
All languages change with time, as speakers innovate
and economise and each generation reanalyses what it received from its
forebears. This does not quickly make a new language, but it can over time;
Latin went through this to become Italian, but Shakespearean English and modern
English are still seen as two versions of the same language, as are Ancient
Greek and modern Greek.
Separation – geographical
distance, cultural divergence, political independence – helps give a changed
version of a language an independent identity. As Max Weinreich famously said
(and linguists often repeat), a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Political separation has allowed Danish and Norse to be distinct.
Contact with other languages is a
very important force: mutual influence leads to borrowing of words and even
grammatical structures. If a language’s speakers move en masse into an
area where another language is spoken, there may be considerable
cross-influence, and one or both languages may simplify grammar because their
speakers are learning each other’s languages.
Influence from Danish, Norse, and
French helped Anglo-Saxon become Chaucer’s English, and French is a descendant
of Latin with some influence from Celtic and Germanic languages.
Sometimes a simplified version is
created for the purposes of trade, often using simplified grammar mainly from
one language and adapted words from mainly from the other. This simplified
version – a pidgin (the word pidgin comes from a modified version of
the word business in one such trade language) – can come to be so
commonly used that children grow up speaking it and flesh it out as a full
all-purpose language: a creole.
All languages have influence from outside their
direct ancestor, but a creole is a language that really has more than one
‘parent’ and sometimes more than two. This is why some people say modern English
is a creole. It is a descendant of Anglo-Saxon, but it also has substantial
influence in core vocabulary and some grammar from older versions of Danish and
Norse, and it has received a large part of its current vocabulary from
French.
For all that, though, we tend to think of
modern English as the culmination of its history, subject at most to small
changes in the future. We seldom ask about the descendants of English: which
languages will be to English as French and Italian are to Latin? Or as modern
English is to Anglo-Saxon?
English already has
linguistic progeny in various parts of the planet. I don’t mean the mutually
intelligible dialects of American, British, Indian, Australian, and other
Englishes, although they may or may not become more distinct from one another in
future.
I mean languages that are not necessarily mutually comprehensible with
English and may even have official status in a country (in other words, they may
have an army and a navy).
Here are a few of the descendants of English currently
being spoken around the world today.Never mind ‘will be’. We can talk about what
languages already are descendants of English.
Tok
Pisin
Tok Pisin is an official language
of Papua New Guinea with about 120,000 native speakers and 4 million
second-language speakers.
There are many English-based
creoles in the world, and many of them exist informally and with multiple
variations ranging from quite different from standard English to very close to
it. In some places, the creoles are the dominant language and have gained
semi-official or official status and, with it, some standardisation.
Tok Pisin
began as a pidgin based on English with influence from German, Portuguese, and
several Austronesian languages, but it gained native speakers who more fully
elaborated it and made it a creole.
Due to the cross-influence of several
languages, it uses fewer vowels and consonants and it has a less inflecting
grammar than English, preferring strings of words rather than prefixes and
suffixes. It is not really mutually intelligible with English, as this
translation of the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights –
the one about all humans being born free and equal in dignity and rights –
shows: “Yumi olgeta mama karim umi long stap fri na wankain long wei yumi
lukim i gutpela na strepela tru.”
Pitkern
After the mutiny on the Bounty in
1789, several of the mutineers and some Tahitians settled on Pitcairn Island.
The mutineers were from various places, including parts of Scotland, England and
the Caribbean, but most were not well educated, and they had little language
understanding in common with the Tahitians.
The isolation of Pitcairn in the
South Pacific made this mixture of people a natural breeding ground for a
distinct language, Pitkern, recognisably descended from English but clearly not
English: “About yee gwen?” means “Where are you going?” and “I se
gwen a nahweh” means “I’m going swimming.”
Fewer than 500 people now speak
Pitkern, however, so in our much more mobile and less isolating world, its
future is not assured.
Gullah
Gullah, also called Geechee, is a
language of the United States; it is the native language of Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas and a heritage language of Michelle Obama. It is also
called Geechee. It is a creole based on English and West African languages, and
it is spoken by some 250,000 people – mostly descendants of slaves – along the
south-east coast of the US. It arose during the 1700s and 1800s, and it is
proudly maintained as a linguistic heritage today. It is to some extent – but
not completely – mutually intelligible with English. If you have ever sung
Kumbayah, you have used at least that one word of Gullah.
Sranan
Sranan, spoken in Suriname,
has an English base with vocabulary from Portuguese, Dutch, and West African
languages.Sranan (also called Sranan
Tongo), spoken by some 400,000 people in Suriname (and first language for about
130,000 of them), has an English base with vocabulary from Portuguese, Dutch,
and West African languages.
It emerged in the 1900s but was discouraged in the
Dutch-run education system. After Suriname gained independence, Sranan’s status
increased considerably. It is not truly mutually intelligible with English, as
this example from omniglot.com shows: “A ben de so taki wan dei mi mama ben bori
okro.”
Singlish
The government of Singapore has
not always wanted people to think that Singlish is anything other than ‘bad
English’. But this popular language is different from English in important ways.
Singlish arose in the past century from the mixing of many different language
groups within an English school system. Much of its grammar is borrowed from
dialects of Chinese, and while many of the words come (sometimes changed) from
English, it also has Malay and Tamil influences.
It is now the native tongue of
many Singaporeans, and much of the country’s daily life is conducted in it.
Since it is not official or standardised, it has multiple varieties on a
continuum from quite similar to standard English all the way to really not
mutually intelligible with English.
To take a couple of examples from
worksingapore.com: “Wah lau, the movie damn sian” (“I didn't really
like the movie. I found it rather uninteresting”) and “Kena saman?
Die, lah” (“I’m being fined? Oh dear”).
And what is the future of English
and its offspring? There are pulls in two directions: on the one hand is the
homogenising influence of the global economy and the internet, engendering
greater conformity and homogeneity (but also spreading innovations rapidly); on
the other hand is the desire for expression of local identity, a sense of
belonging to a place and a distinct culture.
English may come to have a global
standard that is not exactly what is spoken in any local culture, which may be
quite different in some places for the reasons mentioned above. Some of those
local varieties may over time have strong mutual influence and convergence with
global English. Others may become independent languages.
Some local varieties will not
survive – the future is not bright for Pitkern. But other local variations may
come to be increasingly local and even, as deliberate expressions of
independence from the dominating hegemony of global English, become standardised
languages of their own, as Tok Pisin has.
