Homophones et al.

[jadesfire]

Following pwcorgigirl's brilliant look at homophones at The Clinic (here), I was inspired to seek out the following poem, heard a long time ago but never forgotten.



By: Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité, 1870-1946

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.
Feoffer 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!!!


The author of The Chaos was a Dutchman, the writer and traveller Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité. Born in 1870, he studied classics, then law, then political science at the University of Utrecht, but without graduating (his Doctorate came later, in 1901). From 1894 he was for a while a private teacher in California, where he taught the sons of the Netherlands Consul-General. From 1901 to 1918 he worked as a schoolteacher in Haarlem, and published several schoolbooks in English and French, as well as a study of the Dutch constitution. From 1909 until his death in 1946 he wrote frequently for an Amsterdam weekly paper, with a linguistic column under the pseudonym Charivarius.

--From Chaos by Chris Upward, Aston University, UK
Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society

Taken from this website: http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/PUB/misc/misc/DearestCreature.html

Comments

[rivers-bend.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this! I feel like I must have seen it before, but it wasn't familiar enough. I read it through and then again aloud. Brightened my day.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Ooh! A rose! Which is clearly the most important thing about the picture ;)

It's so much fun! My Polish and Turkish colleagues are having great fun with it...

[rivers-bend.livejournal.com]

Never let it be said that a rose was less important than Tony Head. *g*

[roga.livejournal.com]

(Here through your post at The Clinic)

I had to read this aloud with my fake British accent, to make pronunciation four syllables instead of five :-)

My god, this reminds me why it's so frustrating to learn English as a second language. I learned most of these words through reading, not from hearing, so I'm still not sure if I pronounced them all correctly. (Even today, sometimes I have to think twice before saying suggest, lest it come out sug-est...)

Honestly, what a freaky language (and a fun poem :-)).

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

(Here through your post at The Clinic)
I've just been replying to you there :)

I'd be intrigued to hear your fake British accent - I have a genuine one, and I say it with 5 syllables...

I work with lots of people who have English with a second language - one of them pointed me to an equivalent in Polish, which sounds even crazier. Surely there shouldn't be so many consonents that close together... ;)

[roga.livejournal.com]

My inner fake British accent said pro-nun-cia-tion, to make it rhyme with the first line. But you don't really want to hear it - it doesn't get out much, only when it occasionally bumps into some Shakespeare, in which case it can't help itself, or if it's particularly excited over some Hugh Laurie clip it finds on You Tube.

There are no invisible letters in Hebrew, and no real vowels either - so the word enough, for instance, would be spelled in three letters: e-n-f. So much simpler :-)