- The Chaos
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For the studio album by The Futureheads, see The Chaos (album).
"The Chaos" is a poem which demonstrates the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation, written by Dutch writer, traveller and teacher Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), also known under the pseudonym Charivarius. It includes about 800 examples of irregular pronunciation, and first appeared in an appendix to the author's 1920 textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen . It has appeared in various versions: the author's first version had 146 lines but "the most complete and authoritative version ever likely to emerge", published by The Spelling Society in 1992-93, has 274 lines.[1]
To demonstrate the flavour of the poem, the opening lines are:
- Dearest creature in creation
- Studying English pronunciation,
- I will teach you in my verse
- Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
and the closing lines are:
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- Finally, which rhymes with enough,
- Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??
- Hiccough has the sound of cup...
- My advice is: GIVE IT UP!
These lines are set out as in the author's version, with alternate couplets indented and the problematic words italicised.[1]
References
- ^ a b Upward, Chris (2004). "The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos". The Spelling Society. http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php. Retrieved 2008-06-04.
External links
- The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos, Introduced by Chris Upward Text of 274-line version of the poem, with introduction, at The Spelling Society website
- Text with IPA transcription of first 15 verses in British and American English, by David Madore
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