I thought I had it ruff, er rough!

I often feel a bit sorry for myself, what with being a non-native Hebrew speaker awash in a sea of new words, slang expressions and vague pronunciations.  But the thing that most frequently trips me up is the spelling.

Since most of the Israelis I interact with are not older Temani (Yemenite) people or people who are equally careful about differentiating between Het and Chaf, Aleph and Ayin, Tet and Taf, etc., I have never really gotten the knack of spelling things properly.

This causes a circular problem of not being able to differentiate between words that sound similar, such as was demonstrated in yesterday's post (thanks for the frequent catches Dave and Rahel) and in this post where, instead of saying "I have my doubts..." I casually explained to a room full of people that "I committed suicide".

Well, I just stumbled across a poem that made me put away my self-pity and thank my lucky stars that I was raised in the U.S. and didn't have to wade into the trackless swamp of arcane spelling, conflicting rules and improbable pronunciation that is the English language, as an adult!

Here, see for yourself:

Hints on pronunciation for foreigners
  By T.S.W. *

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh* and through.
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 and thwart and cart
Come, come, I’ve barely made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

I hereby solemnly swear to have much more compassion for non-native English speakers who have gained even modest proficiency in my convoluted - even cruel - mother tongue.  And people like Mademoiselle a. (German) and Lioness (Portuguese) who actually blog in English... I'm just not worthy to breathe the same air!

* While this poem is occasionally attributed to George Bernard Shaw (likely because he was so passionate about the horrendous state of English spelling and pronunciation that he was the driving force behind the creation of a new alphabet), but most sources I've seen say that this poem was first published in 'The London Sunday Times' on January 3, 1965 under the otherwise unknown author T.S.W.'s initials.

** Some of the versions of this poem I've found have 'lough' (pronounced lock; which is a lake or arm of a sea) instead of 'laugh'.  This was probably changed by people sharing the poem who, lime myself, were unfamiliar with the word 'lough' or its pronunciation.

Hat tip 'Mostly Cajun'