Passed on by Paul Armstrong, this site (from 12/23/11), which purports to be about English pronunciation:
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.
The poem is of course about English spelling, and the mapping from spelling to pronunciation. Corpse, corps, horse, worse; heart, beard, heard; and all that.
The poem is by Dutchman Gerald Nolst Trenité (1870-1946).
February 20, 2013 at 7:05 pm |
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Since when has “parquet” exactly rhymed with “khaki”?
February 20, 2013 at 7:19 pm |
New to me, and wonderful. Amazingly well done verse, astonishingly good for a non-native speaker.
I remember when I was in the Army close to 50 years ago, a Boston speaker who pronounced “khakis” like “car keys”. Took me quite a while to figure out what he was talking about.
February 20, 2013 at 8:19 pm |
I would rather expect a Boston speaker to pronounce “car keys” like “khakis”.
February 20, 2013 at 7:58 pm |
I’ve been using a rather non-standard pronunciation of Terpsichore for some time, apparently. I’ve always rhymed it with ‘more’ and given it initial stress. That’s a new thing I’ve learned today.
February 21, 2013 at 4:58 pm |
There’s a a photo going around Facebook (here at George Takei’s page) playing on khakis/car keys
February 21, 2013 at 5:15 pm |
Will reminds me of my childhood, when I thought there was a name spelled Penelope pronounced /’pɛn ə loʊp/ and one spelled I didn’t know how but pronounce /pə ‘nɛl ə pi/.
February 21, 2013 at 5:59 pm |
It was Persephone that tripped me up as a child. I wondered to my mother who in their right mind would name their child /ˈpɜsəfoʊn/
February 22, 2013 at 8:53 am |
Jerry Sadock on Facebook:
Just to note the ambiguity of read here. Ordinarily the verb means ‘read with understanding’ — that’s what you would understand if I said “I can read Finnish” — but in certain contexts it can mean ‘convert text into pronunciation’, with no implication of understanding. I can in fact read Finnish in the latter sense. When, many years ago, I read (in this sense) a Finnish comic book handed to me by Jaana Karttunen, she (legitimately) felt cheated.