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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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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.
Will you give it a try?
Dearest creature in creation, study English in pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse, sounds like corpse, corps, and horse and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, make your head with heat grow dizzy, tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer, just compare heart, beard, and heard, dies and diet, lord and word, sword and sward, retain and Britain. ( mind the latter, how its written.) Now I surely will not plague you, with such words as plague and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, daughter, laughter, and terpsichore, typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, exiles, smiles and reviles; one, anemone, Balmoral,kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, scene, melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, lord and broad, toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciations OK when you correctly say croquet, rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour and endeavour rhyme and hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, neither does devour and clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, and then singer, ginger, linger, real, xeal, mauve, gauge, gouge and gauge. Marriage, foliage, mirage and age. Query does not rhyme with very, nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth, job, nob, bosom, transum, oath. Though the difference seem little, we say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer, and zephyr, heifer, mint, pint, senate and sedate; dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave, and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, people, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, principle, disciple, label, petal, panel, and canal, wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal, worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and seccour, four. Gas,alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare, alien with Italian, dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, eye, I, ay, aye, whey and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and arie. Face but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear do not rhyme with here but ear. Seven is right, but so is even, hyphen, roughen, nephew. Stephen, monkey, donkey, turk and jerk, ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) is a paling stout and spikey? Wont it make you lose your wits, writing, groats and saying grits? Its a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,Islington and Isle of Wight, housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough. Through, throug, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!  |
Madame Boo
is in the detail