English Is Tough Stuff - Must read out loud !

[TBiRD]

English Is Tough Stuff

Multinational personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization 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. Try them yourself.


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; clamor
And enamor 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 succor, 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 spiky?
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!!!

[Sexyredhead]

I had no problem saying all of that.

But I\'m a geek. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[Andy]

I think the point is that words might not be pronounced the same way even with the same word components. Like youth - south, fury - bury, etc.

[DaVinciKittie]

Just reading that gave me a headache. I actually read it aloud until about halfway through, and decided I\'d had enough! [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img] For those of you who speak multiple languages (fluently), did you find English more difficult to master than the others?

[Andy]

The worst language I ever learned was french. Sorry frenchies, nothing personal. You didn\'t know what kinda trouble counting can give you unless you tried to learn french. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

An example for the not french tortured people around here ... 83 \"eightythree\" ... easy, isn\'t it ... right ... but not in french, it\'s \"quatre-vingts-troi\", that\'s 4-20-3 [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]. I know that this seems perfectly normal to native french speaking people, but for somebody who learned to count up to 100 straight this just seems not right.
How evolved that acrobatic countin\' anyway? Did they discover by accident that there are more possible numbers than 69 ? I love da 69, no question \'bout that, but DUDES ... you really shouldn\'t have stopped to count from 69 on. I understand that it\'s almost impossible to lick, get a nice bj and count meanwhile, especially while performing with a cute french girl, but you really should have been more caring.
Ok, since every nice sexual encounter has an end some time, you opened your eyes one day and thought \"Hey .. ok, our fault, lets add 60-10\" or what? What kinda crap is this \"60-10\" ? I bet some little brats in preschool would have worked out something more innovative. But the next mistake is already on it\'s way, someone started to think! again at 60-10-9, \"Oh [bad word] ... this is not gonna work out, lets do it different from that on and add 4-20 and pick up the crap later with 4-20-10.\" [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

I bet the only thing that saved you from using 4-25 or 2-50 or worse 3-33.333333 was the fact that some french smartasses have stolen the 100 from the roman legions. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]