A is for apple
Crisp and sweet
B is for banana
How nice and neat
Those early-learning children’s books
Make’s seem as easy as it looks
Only it’s not. Having been trying to learn Gaelic pronunciation, and being frustrated by it, I came to realise that English is far worse. Only we have lived with it from birth and so accept it as normal. We just know – or guess.
So sit down, wee laddie,
Shut up, listen up
I’ll teach you all I know.
It won’t take long
Then you can leave and go.
A is indeed for apple. But it has other sounds too. Look how the ‘a’ changes in the following: all, allow, half, hand, halt. What? No wot! Where’s the rule?
Spare a thought
Those who ought
Or need or yearn
English, to learn.
B is for banana. There, that’s nice and neat!
C. A bit of French knowledge helps here. You see, C can be a hard K sound or a soft S sound. Those Frenchies have hard vowels, A, O & U, and soft vowels, I & E. The vowel following the C determines its sound. And if it breaks that rule, they mark it with a cedilla; it’s a façade. English usually follows suit but in a less helpful way. Should you wonder why there’s a U in biscuit. Our Gallic heritage. Nobody wants a soft biscuit.
C is for cantaloupe, cephalopod and concatenate and coelacanth. See! Glasgow Celtic FC at home in a Celtic nation. Flaccid? I sympathise.
D is for damsons and dates. Unless it appears before a long U. Then it’s a J. It’s your duty to know.
E can be long or short. No helpful graves or acutes to show. You just have to learn, and remember!
F is for finally getting to grips with this stuff.
G. By George, he’s in the gorge. Similar hard and soft vowels to C. But don’t get (soft vowel, hard G) complacent. Get it wrong and you’ll go to gaol.
H is neither vowel nor consonant. It’s an aspirant. A huff. A puff. A breath. Hurricanes hardly (h)ever happen in Hampshire, Herefordshire and Hertfordshire. But when they do they’re gone in the hour. We’ll come to H, the modifier later.
J. Not a Germanic Y but a harder soft French zhuh. Jolly japes, jesting and joking. Well I’ll be jiggered. I think that’s universal.
K is for kiwi and kumquat.
L is for like, the most abused word. Like, I blame Shaggy. Like, he likes to use like all the like time. L gets swallowed when towards the rear end of a word. Fondled, garbled, misled. Aha! misled you! You’ve been mis-led.
Mmmmm, scrumptious.
N is negative. No! Nay, non, net, nein, nee, na, nei, votch…?
Oh dear! We have those in our Scottish hills. Look! Oh deer, they’re gone.
P is for papaya and pomegranate.
Q can’t abide loneliness. Never travels without U. Ah! Such loyalty.
R. Why are pirates? Because they arrrr! The West Country’s favourite letter. They roar and they rage and they rape. But they don’t pillage. That was a few letters ago and we missed the opportunity.
S is for surprise, surprise. Is that a hiss or zz? Both in one word. Back to having to know. You’ve had it easy recently. We don’t chicken out like those Yanks across the pond. We do realise that. They don’t realize that. Are you sure? Oh no! Not another one.
T is for tea. Afternoon tea, with a pianist to play us a tune. A what? A choon? No toons around here.
U is ugli fruit. Could be universally unappealing. Long and short. U need to know.
V is very hard F.
W. Now don’t get ideas that this might be anything other than W for weather. Yes, we have Folksvagens, but they’re not from around here. Sadly it has a tendency to go missing in the company of Rs. Perhaps it’s those pirates and their fondness for wrecking.
X. Interesting. Initially a Z. So why do we have an X? You’ll have to ask the Greeks. Xylophones from xylon. Subequently KS. I’m extremely uxorious. Not really.
Y is for yankee. But we’ve already been confused by them. So Y is for yee-ha, we’ve nearly finished. It’s a semi-vowel and so will occasionally stand-in for an I. Otherwise rhythm would be an unpronounceable jumble of consonants.
Z. Zed, not zee. A buzzy sound.
And so we reach the end of the alphabet, confused yet relieved.
Can I go home now?
No. We haven’t dealt with that combinational, modifying H.
Following an A, it’s just a lengthener. Ah! Following a B, well we’ll leave that to the Scots. Brae Riabhach. But after a C? This is the beginning of the fun and games. CH for chintzy in Chelsea. A kind of ty sound. But it could be a soft SH sound as in chauffeur brochure. Or a hard K sound as in choreographed chorus.
DH is not at home in English. The Arabs have a dhow but you don’t get many of those in the Thames. Scots like it. Buidhe, yellow.
After an E or F, something of a non-event. But G? Oh what fun! Sometimes it’s a magician and makes the G disappear. I thought you knew that, though. Sometimes it turns G into an F. Honestly, who came up with this? That is really rough. A ruff is something else. A cough, but not a coffin. It’s the coffin they carry you off in! Never go to Loughborough. Luffbruff, Lobro, Lobruff, Luffbro? It’s in Leicestershire – three syllables, not four.
I through to O shouldn’t bother us too much. P also turns into an F. Phony logic. Well, no logic at all, really. Rh for rheumatism. Only affects the pedants who might insist on sounding a minor hruff.
SH. Shhh! We’re all sleeping.
TH is a T but with the tongue poking out between the teeth. But even this creates two distinct sounds that you must know. This thing. Listen to them both. They’re different.
U and V can be ignored.
After a W it’s ignored by most, non-posh English English speakers. But listen to a Scottish English speaker. No, he’s not drunk. Yes, most of them are. They’re just unintelligible. If you can understand a word at all, you’ll hear a w-h sound in where and what and why. But then that H might dispose of the W altogether and usurp its position. Whoever would have thought that whores are not wholesome?
X, Y, Z? Uncommon.
Now can I go home?
No. We have only hinted at the difficulties of the long U following certain consonants.
After a C you add in a y sound. Cute – cyute. Cures for cuteness. It turns a D into a J. Duel, duet, duty. We get the y sound again after F. Fyurious? Similarly with H – hyuman. Jyunior, Kyudos, Lyurid, Myule, Nyutrition – it’s good for you – Pyuke, but not after R. How rude! Not after S either. Super! Are you sure? Like shore. I don’t know…
T becomes CH. No, it’s not fair. Tunes on Tuesday. Choons on Choosday. Ideally it should be TY as above. Tyune. But who’s that picky?
Other missing letters – Bdellium, Gnat, Knowledge, Mnemonic, Pneumonia, Wreck. Debt, Diaphragm and Indict.
Rhyming (or not).
How now brown cow.
But know as go and throw.
But through as in grew.
And thought in distraught.
Yes, I know you are.
Other randomness – who says TI is SH? As in direction and propitiatory. And SI is ZH in precision, CI is SH in facial.
Boom! Oh dear. I think your cranium has just exploded, due to a sudden, violent and unexpected expansion of the brain. Crania as in many such.
Yes, I have prolonged the agony and the pain; and yet only scratching the surface. The fact is that English is a most ridiculous language – yet at the same time, deep and rich. Allegedly, it has the largest vocabulary of any language. And the fact is - we all struggle with it. We have a subset of common words that we use in daily life and we happily, without thinking, cope magnificently with its bizarreness and irregularities as if it’s all normal. Beyond that, there is a vast array of words that we don’t know the meaning of, don’t know how to use, don’t know how to pronounce, and don’t know how to spell. Diaereses? Oh, Diarrhoea? So sorry. Run along. What’s that? Enamour? No? Enemy? No! Enema. Ah yes, of course. We Brits see learning other languages as a difficulty and a chore. Double Dutch! It’s all French to me. What on earth do we do with cedillas, umlauts (that’s Huw Edwards starting a news item on hooliganism), tildas, breves and all the other ornamentation that is used to help the speaker learn these impenetrable foreign languages?
So don’t be lazy. Gaelic is quite straight-forward in comparison. There are but 18 letters. Spare a thought for the learner of English.
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