The English Lesson

[KillerGremlin]

There was a thing on Digg:
http://digg.com/educational/The_Engl...guage_Is_Goofy

Here's the site from the story:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/0...orough-enough/

Seven ways to pronounce ough:

* dough
* tough
* hiccough
* bough
* ought
* cough
* through

"If the English language made any sense," wrote Doug Larson, "lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers."

Anyway, that was kind of lame. But someone posted a really good comment (which is why it's good to sometimes read Digg comments).

The English Lesson
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot... would a pair be beet?
If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth?
If the singular is this, and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be kese?
Then one may be that, and three be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.
So our English, I think you will agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
of tough, and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, through, slough and though.
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, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language: Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.

[An alternative version quotes the final couplet as:
And yet to write it, the more I sigh,
I'll not learn how 'til the day I die.]

It's a cool poem. Anyway here is the site I lifted the poem from:
http://www.fun-with-words.com/double_english.html

It's a funny reminder how ridiculous English is....

(This thread was inspired by Bond's griping of the spelling of 'intelligence.' I thought his complaint was funny. Even more funny is when I started listening to the band Dark Tranquillity, I learned tranquility has two preferred spellings...with 1 or 2 ls.)

[KillerGremlin]

And actually, the Digg comment seems to have another variant:

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England .
We take English for granted,
but if we explore its paradoxes,
we find that quicksand can work slowly,
boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig
is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing,
grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham.
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make
amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and
get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking
English should be committed to an
asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play
and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send
cargo by ship. We have noses that
run and feet that smell. And how can a slim
chance and a fat chance
be the same, while a wise man and a
wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of
a language in which your house can burn up as
it burns down, in which you fill in a form by
filling it out, and in which an
alarm goes off by going on.

So if Father is Pop, how come Mother isn't Mop?

And that is just the beginning--
even though this is the end!

[Angrist]

Apparently Dutch is harder than Chinese. Boy am I glad I already know the hard one!

[Typhoid]

Frankly I'm glad I was born into learning English.
I wouldn't want to do it if I wasn't forced into it.

[Angrist]

Learning languages can be a lot of fun. At the moment I speak Dutch and English. My French and German are good enough to understand most of it. I'm looking into Spanish and Norwegian, but I won't really start until my French and German get better.
Oh and then there's our local language, Frisian. I understand 98%, speak 15%.

[The Germanator]

Yeah, I like kinda knowing another language, and that's Spanish for me. It's pretty damn rusty and I feel embarrassed when I try to speak it. but having a pretty good understanding has helped me a lot when we've played in Spain. If I spent a little while refreshing myself on some of the tenses I could probably jump back into it pretty easily.

[Typhoid]

I know French, and I know it really well. I can understand things, but when it comes to talking, I would be the equivalent of a Russian trying to speak English when he just gets to North America.

[BreakABone]

Originally Posted by The Germanator

Yeah, I like kinda knowing another language, and that's Spanish for me. It's pretty damn rusty and I feel embarrassed when I try to speak it. but having a pretty good understanding has helped me a lot when we've played in Spain. If I spent a little while refreshing myself on some of the tenses I could probably jump back into it pretty easily.

I can form some pretty bad sentences in Spanish, ask Zen about my skills.

Actually, I do retain a lot more information than I originally thought, and depending on the source can kind of understand when people speak to me in the language.

With that said, I have heard, though can't know, that English is actually one of the hardest languages to learn if not a native speaker since... we really don't have any hard and fast rules.