+copy.jpg)
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Why is English becoming universal?
Take the 'gh' from 'cough'
add the 'o' from 'women'
add the 't' from 'nation'
add the silent 'ugh' from 'dough'
and you get GHOTUGH
reading FISH!
If you want to know why I love OTHER languages so much, this is one reason...
Recovering Sounds from Orthography
Brush up Your English
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others my stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, bough and through.
Well done! An 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 hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five!
(T.S. Watt (1954) in The Guardian. Cited with permission in Taylor, Insup and M. Martin Taylor. 1983. The Psychology of Reading. New York: Academic Press. p. 99)
add the 'o' from 'women'
add the 't' from 'nation'
add the silent 'ugh' from 'dough'
and you get GHOTUGH
reading FISH!
If you want to know why I love OTHER languages so much, this is one reason...
Recovering Sounds from Orthography
Brush up Your English
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others my stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, bough and through.
Well done! An 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 hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five!
(T.S. Watt (1954) in The Guardian. Cited with permission in Taylor, Insup and M. Martin Taylor. 1983. The Psychology of Reading. New York: Academic Press. p. 99)
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Back at SIL again
A little less than a year ago while at SIL, I created this blog. I began it with the following quote:
"Surrender is not the surrender of the external life, but of the will; when that is done, all is done. There are very few crises in life; the great crisis is the surrender of the will." -Oswald Chambers
I'm still working at this lifelong battle of surrender. I am back to updating, and I hope to let you know all about my happenings of the summer. :) I'm enjoying myself here at linguistic boot camp. It's very difficult though, and I have classes from 8-5 (with a couple breaks). All I do is study, play some volleyball, and have conversations full of words like bilabial fricatives, phonologically similar segments, cannibalism, etc. More to come. Homework is screaming my name... until next time...
"Surrender is not the surrender of the external life, but of the will; when that is done, all is done. There are very few crises in life; the great crisis is the surrender of the will." -Oswald Chambers
I'm still working at this lifelong battle of surrender. I am back to updating, and I hope to let you know all about my happenings of the summer. :) I'm enjoying myself here at linguistic boot camp. It's very difficult though, and I have classes from 8-5 (with a couple breaks). All I do is study, play some volleyball, and have conversations full of words like bilabial fricatives, phonologically similar segments, cannibalism, etc. More to come. Homework is screaming my name... until next time...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
