Comments on: Confusion reigns and/or rains

By: Young Toss

Young Toss — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:01:15 +0000

trust witch to steal the joy from mr v – with possibly the best ever poem about random englishness.

Typical witch – he’s right at the same time. But what he meant was english is essentially an eqaul parts latinate/germanic cross. Which is why everyone can understand us (if not the spelling) but we can’t understand anyone else – cos we only get half of their language structure.

Either that or we are lazy monoglots…

By: the witch

the witch — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:05:30 +0000

The weird spelling is mostly because English is a total mixture of Anglo-saxon germanic with lots of Old French , Latin and Greek added in and stuff from other languages too.

By: MrVibrating

MrVibrating — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:06:48 +0000

I take it you already know,
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and 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 in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth 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 and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Why man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five.

By: debi

debi — Sat, 31 May 2008 07:11:09 +0000

I can totally sympathize with you on this one! Daughter number one attends a school where they speak/read/write in Dutch (well, we live in Holland, so that’s not all that strange). Thing is, she’s doing fine there. In fact, she’s doing really, really well (the top reader in her class!).

But, we have to teach her to read in English at home. AHH! I’ve had to try to explain all of those strange spellings and “rules” without the fallback of being able to say “Well, that’s what your teacher says, right?”

Fortunately, she seems to be doing pretty well in English, too. She just turned 8, and she’s reading the Hobbit. Now there’s another set of strange words!