The Chaos
(摘自1920 教科书 Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité)
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
It will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear.
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Made has not the sound of bade;
Say, said, pay, paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuschia, via,
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, reviles;
Wholly, holly, signal, signing
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
From “desire”: desirable
-admirable from “admire”;
Lumber, plumber, bier but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Billet does not end like ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
Ricocheted and croqueting, croquet?
