Can You Pronounce All These Words Correctly?
“The Chaos” is easily the best thing ever written about the mind-boggling inconsistencies of English pronunciation.
Skip to the end (or click here) for a puzzle I’ve made you. My crash course on how to do cryptic puzzles begins here.
His name was Gerard Nolst Trenité, and he was — there’s no other way of saying this — a pedant. A nitpicker. A fault-finder and a hair-splitter. A stickler for the rules. A punctilious fussbudget know-it-all. OK, so there are a few other ways of saying it. But the man literally had a column in his city’s weekly magazine where he “scolded, berated, teased, and criticized his fellow countrymen for their sloppy and annoying language habits.”1
And yet, as the saying goes that I just invented, sometimes inveterate pedantry is the best disinfectant, and our hero’s raging fastidiousness about the little quirks and flukes of his native language became — when turned on our own — one of the funniest, cleverest, most incisive bits of writing ever produced about the absolutely deranged supervillain that is English pronunciation.
“The Chaos,” a poem by Trenité written under the pseudonym “Charivarius,” first appeared as an appendix in the fourth edition of his language textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen (meaning “English pronunciation exercises”) in 1920. According to legend, it was found in a German girls’ school by a British soldier in 1945 and later circulated amongst NATO staff to help them keep abreast of English pronunciation pitfalls. It was eventually traced back to its source in the early ’90s by members of the Simplified Spelling Society, one of whom had a copy of Drop Your Foreign Accent dedicated to “Miss Susanne Delacruix, Paris,” who may have been a student of Trenité’s as well as the “Dearest creature in creation … Susy” to whom the poem is addressed.
Trenité tinkered with his poem with each successive edition of Drop Your Foreign Accent, eventually doubling it in length. You can read the long version here, but I’m including the original, shorter version below, with a few of the more questionable verses switched out for later emendations.
I hope, as Trenité intended, that “rhyme and rhythm have a soothing effect on the bewildered learner, and lead him into the right path.” It’s surprisingly fun to read out loud.
“The Chaos,” by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité
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, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail2, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore3,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.
Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.
From "desire": desirable-admirable from "admire",
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham4, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading5, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,
And your pronunciation's OK,
When you say correctly: croquet.
Rounded, wounded, grieve, and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive, and live.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover.
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice,
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,
Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it",
But it is not hard to tell
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the a of drachm and hammer.
Pussy, hussy and possess,
Desert, but desert, address.
Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
Cow, but Cowper6, some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.
Shoes, goes, does7. Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,
Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry, fury, bury,
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, Job8, blossom, bosom, oath.
Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
Put, nut, granite, and unite.
Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer9 does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.
Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
Rally with ally; yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess-it is not safe,
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralph10.
Starry, granary, canary,
Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
Face, but preface, then grimace,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
Do not rhyme with here but heir.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.
Pronunciation-think of Psyche!-
Is a paling11, 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 like rowlock, gunwale12,
Islington, and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough13, tough??
Hiccough has the sound of sup...
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!
Trenité rather charmingly prepares the reader for the exasperated advice his poem ends with in the preface to the book: “The last line contains an advice; my advice is — don’t take it.” All in all, a rare and delightful win for the pedants.
I have made you a puzzle. The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in with a click!
The now archaic “Studding Sail” (a fair-weather sail for a square-rigged boat) is, shockingly, pronounced stuns’l
Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dance, is pronounced terpsi-corry
Brougham, a type of carriage, is, preposterously, pronounced broom
Reading, the town in England, is pronounced redding
The 18th century English poet William Cowper pronounced his surname cooper
As in female deer
Job, as in the Biblical book of Job, pronounced jobe
Feoffer is an archaic legal term for someone who grants (or “enfeoffs”) a fee. As Trenité notes, it’s pronounced to rhyme with deafer
The English name Ralph can be pronounced rafe, as in Fiennes
A “paling,” as in a fencepost
Another nautical term (meaning the top edge of a boat), pronounced gunnel
Hough (the hollow behind the knee) is pronounced hock, and Sough (a sigh or murmuring sound) is pronounced sau or soff
That was a marathon!