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04/03/2006 05:52:27 AM · #1 |
I love this poem -- it sums up the insanity that is the English Language perfectly!
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through.
Well don't! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard but sounds like bird.
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead,
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth as in mother
Nor both as in bother, nor broth as in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear, for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword
And do and go, then thwart and cart,
Come, come! I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful Language? Why man alive!
I learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
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04/03/2006 05:54:50 AM · #2 |
| I sent the poem to my english professor in the past but he insisted I deserved the F he gave me for my papers.... oh well |
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04/03/2006 06:01:47 AM · #3 |
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04/03/2006 06:24:56 AM · #4 |
I cant read chinese, but what the hell?
how did you find it? you can read Chinese? :p |
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04/03/2006 06:28:28 AM · #5 |
Actually this is American not English.
hiccough doesn't exist in English, it's hiccup.
Message edited by author 2006-04-03 06:29:29. |
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04/03/2006 06:32:10 AM · #6 |
Originally posted by bluenova:
Actually this is American not English.
hiccough doesn't exist in English, it's hiccup. |
According to my Oxford English Dictionary, both exist in English
Although I would agree that hiccup is the usual term.
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04/03/2006 06:47:10 AM · #7 |
Originally posted by Artan:
Originally posted by bluenova:
Actually this is American not English.
hiccough doesn't exist in English, it's hiccup. |
According to my Oxford English Dictionary, both exist in English
Although I would agree that hiccup is the usual term. |
LOL, ok, I was searching online and it always came up with American dictionarys for hiccough and English dictionarys for hiccup, maybe it's an old word. |
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04/03/2006 07:22:15 AM · #8 |
Originally posted by bluenova:
Originally posted by Artan:
Originally posted by bluenova:
Actually this is American not English.
hiccough doesn't exist in English, it's hiccup. |
According to my Oxford English Dictionary, both exist in English
Although I would agree that hiccup is the usual term. |
LOL, ok, I was searching online and it always came up with American dictionarys for hiccough and English dictionarys for hiccup, maybe it's an old word. |
Most American (mis)spellings are old-fashioned variations.
But then what can you expect from a country that doesn't know what a fortnight is :-) |
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04/03/2006 07:46:27 AM · #9 |
Originally posted by ganders:
But then what can you expect from a country that doesn't know what a fortnight is :-) |
That is just too weak. lol
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04/03/2006 08:21:51 AM · #10 |
We had a shorter version of that poem pasted inside the back cover of our dictionary at home (ok, one of our dictionaries).
The spelling of hiccough is cited as a confusion with cough. |
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04/03/2006 09:08:45 AM · #11 |
Originally posted by Artan:
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead,
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
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Unless you come from the Highlands, maybe.
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04/03/2006 11:16:02 AM · #12 |
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04/03/2006 11:23:53 AM · #13 |
Originally posted by ganders:
Most American (mis)spellings are old-fashioned variations.
But then what can you expect from a country that doesn't know what a fortnight is :-) |
A fortnight as I always understood it was 2 weeks or 14 days. *shrug*
And frankly, Americans did quite a bit to bring pronounciation of English to match spelling. And cease pronouncing a waistcoat as a wiscut.
:P |
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04/03/2006 11:29:49 AM · #14 |
Fun stuff, both english and Chinese versions are going on my PDA. I'm particularly happy that the characters are traditonal, but there are some curiosities that make me wonder if perhaps this might take a Cantonese read to make it sound right? Any idea which language that poem was written in? (Characters are shared, but grammar and sentence structure is subtly different in Cantonese)
EDIT: Looked more closely and it's quite definitely Taiwanese. I missed it the first time, but the bottom post-script mentions both the name of the writer and even mentions Taiwan.
My reading is pretty poor (I only got like 60-70% of that and it was a bit of a slog), but it looked like Mandarin grammar to me.
As an example of what I mean could be in the second column where it compared a Zi Dan (bullet) to a Ji Dan (chicken egg). Am I missing something?
Oh and Art, where DID you find that gem?
<---- English Teacher/Chinese student in Taiwan.
I had a lot of fun a while back adlibbing a Chinese version of "If Moses supposes his toeses are roses" from My Fair Lady.
Chinese Limericks are pretty fun too. Especially if you can swing an Irish accent in there.... ;)
Message edited by author 2006-04-04 05:56:26. |
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04/03/2006 11:38:39 AM · #15 |
Originally posted by eschelar:
Chinese Limericks are pretty fun too. Especially if you can swing an Irish accent in there.... ;) |
My mind boggles at the concept of a Chinese Limerick read with Irish Accent...... |
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04/04/2006 05:54:42 AM · #16 |
Best done with poems about love.
Love in Chinese is Ai and with an Irish accent comes out roughly the same as "aye".
Scottish is often more fun because of the rolling guttorals.
Both can get a class of kids rolling in the aisles with stitches if pulled off adequately.
Incidentally, I checked more closely on that Chinese variant and found some very interesting information.
It's a song written by one of the most popular Taiwanese songwriters of the eighties. Apparently he was more popular in his time than the present Jay (zhou jie lun) who seriously rocks IMHO.
It's called old lady because the content is something like an open letter to the reigning politicians who many felt were more pre-occupied with military considerations (hence zi dan bi ji dan zhong yao = bullets are considered more important than eggs).
It's not really about language or curiosities of pronunciation any more than any other song contains well arranged lyrics.
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04/04/2006 06:40:29 AM · #17 |
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04/04/2006 07:18:37 AM · #18 |
| Awesome, had some fun with the kids here at work already! The Chinese teacher had a rough time with it too, although she is Amis, whose primary mother tongue isn't actually Chinese. |
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04/04/2006 07:41:55 AM · #19 |
Originally posted by ganders:
But then what can you expect from a country that doesn't know what a fortnight is :-) |
isn't that what kids do when the spend the night in their fort in the back yard? |
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