Test Your Pronunciation Abilities with this Wild Poem!

By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Need a little mental booster to wake you up  today?  Here’s a linguistic challenge for you!

In 1920, Dutchman Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946) published the following poem in one of his textbooks about accents.  It’s called “The Chaos”* and it demonstrates how difficult it is to pronounce all of the strangely-spelled words in the English language.  Here is a small excerpt of the fairly lengthy poem, try to read it OUT LOUD to yourself (italicized words are either spelled or pronounced differently):

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, 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! 10
Just compare heart, hear 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, 20

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,

Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

There’s a GREAT DEAL MORE, so head on over to The Spelling Society’s full text of the poem.  The further you get the harder the words get to pronounce.  I found my brain and my tongue beginning to tire about half way through!

After reading the whole thing OUT LOUD, how well did you do?  What words did you stumble over or not recognize?  Post ‘um below in the comments!

*note: this is an updated version, edited and corrected by The Spelling Society