Elemental Fish

It’s actually from the 1850’s. It was written to show that English needed stricter pronunciation rules. Seems it didn’t work.

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To this day I’m not sure if it was a senior who swiped them, or some kid in the neighborhood. Typically we never locked our cars. Strangely enough, even though I was mad about losing the CDs, I was more pissed that they took the 1lb bag of sour patch kids my girlfriend at the time just gave me. :astonished: #priorities

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My car was broken into once. They stole… I kid you not… an earring I had in the change holder, a couple of CDs, and a shirt I’d gotten earlier that night for my birthday. What they did not do was pop the truck and take the ~$3,000 worth of audio equipment and instruments I had in there. I never even got to wear the shirt… :frowning:

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“A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of
Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through.
Well don’t! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard but 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 as in mother
Nor both as in bother, nor broth as 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, then thwart and cart,
Come, come! I’ve hardly made a start.
A dreadful Language? Why man alive!
I learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five.

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Non-native English language learners of English, especially the American slang of the language, have immense trouble with the pronunciations of the many similar looking words, as the poem shows. We Americans have much distorted the English (UK version) language. :us: :smirk: - Rich

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English doesn’t so much adopt words as drag them into an alley, beat them up, then kidnap them.

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Reminds me of The Chaos
http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

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I grew up bilingual and I always had to stop and pause to think of the past present and future in English. Oh and the different word used to describe the animal - Eg. Kitten/Cat, Puppy/Dog etc…

In Mandarin. There s no past present or future tense. The time frame is given usually at the beginning of the sentence. Eg. Yesterday I eat a chocolate bar, Today I eat a chocolate bar, Tomorrow I eat a chocolate bar. The animals are give the size to know if it’s a kitten/cat. Eg. Small Cat = Kitten, Small Dog = Puppy

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You only need to remember one grammar rule for English. It’s based on the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: given a controlled set of circumstances an animal will do whatever it darn well wants to. Substitute English for animal and that’s all you need to know :grin:

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You ever listen to a Brit with a Cockney dialect?

Yeah, American English is a breeze compared to that! :slight_smile:

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What about small dogs in contrast to big dogs when they’re both adults - like a corgi vs a St. Bernard?

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When I was 18, I have lived on the coast of Maine my whole life and had a strong Maine accent. I visited London and it took me 5 minutes to order a cup of coffee at breakfast because there was no common language between me and the Cockney waitress. The guy sitting at the table with me was almost falling out of his chair laughing so hard.

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Good question! If referring to the actual size - we put the size at the end of the sentence.
Eg. The small dog is big. Translation: The Puppy is big (In comparison to other puppies)

Small Dog = Puppy
The dog is small = When referring to the “size” rather than the difference between a puppy/adult dog

LOL

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Yeah, and English is confusing :smile:

It’s what you grew up with I guess. Like any other non-objective “fact”. But that’s from someone who isn’t smart enough to speak any other (human) language. (I do speak multiple computing languages and used to actually converse in binary in college - but what else do male computer engineers do in a college in far north New York where they outnumber the females 5 to 1?) :slight_smile:

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Oh and to be polite - we never call someone fat. We say they are “well feed” hahaha

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Hung hao!

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Hahaha Yes - Very good!

My husband is learning but he says the “tone” of the words in Mandarin is too hard - if mispronounced it can have a complete different meaning. :scream_cat:

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I’m with him – its tonal nature terrifies me! I’m afraid that instead of saying “those pandas sure are cute,” it will come across as “your child is ugly and I steal bread.

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There are ‘romantic languages’ and …others.
I remember Ricardo Montalban saying before he learned to speak English, listening to it spoken reminded him of dogs growling.

For grins

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We’ll often say they’re “heavy”. Then they go to the gym, go on a diet and lose fat but the muscle that they’re building weighs more and they don’t lose weight so they get frustrated. :slightly_smiling_face:

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