One of the major sources of frustration for people learning English is the frequent disconnect between the way a word is spelled and the way it’s pronounced. All languages evolve over time, of course, but English has come a very long way from where it started a thousand years ago. From its early Germanic and Norse elements, words were added over the years from Romance languages like French and Italian, which had completely different orthographies. As explorers visited and returned from the Middle East, India, and China, more words were added based on the objects and ideas found in those countries, and more ways of spelling and pronunciation were added to the mix. By the 20th century, English had become a kaleidoscope of colorful ways to put letters together, and most attempts to impose a more standardized match between spelling and pronunciation had failed. In the London magazine The Spectator, a poem attributed to Lord Cromer was published in 1902 that sums up all of the frustration caused by this quirk of the English language. We can’t change the rules of English spelling and pronunciation at this point, so we might as well laugh while we study them!

Our Strange Lingo

When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it’s true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose,and lose
And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone –
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don’t agree.

Cross-posted at the Ultimate Spelling blog.