h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"That's a rule?"

Er, no. Not really.

Spiff, I think I know the one you mean - let me have a check down the back of my sofa.

This the one???


English as she is spoke

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 know 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 rose and close 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!

I think the poem you are thinking of is the one that is half way down this page:

http://www.ucmas.com/prog_glorious.htm

simulpost

The spelling rules in English are because English is not completely phonetic. The main thing they govern is the pronunciation of the five vowels a,e,i,o and u. Each of these has two pronunciations, known as long and short for historical reasons.

THe vowel is by default short as in pan, pen, pin, Ron and pun.

Adding a "magic e" after the final consonant makes the vowel long as in pane, dene, pine, tone and tune.

The vowel can also be lengthened by adding another syllable on the end, without doubling the consonant, as in plating, scheming, pining, phoning and tuning.

Doubling the consonant prevents the following syllable from affecting the vowel, as in panning, penning, pinning, conning and cunning.

These are the spelling rules. And as I said before, 85% of words fit them. This and other more subtle rules are why you can know how to pronounce supercalifragilisticexpialidocious without ever having heard the word said. And in fact at the age of 9, I could spell that word getting only two letters wrong without ever having seen it written down.

Indeed that was the one, thanks both of you,

Hi Spiff, long time!!

F19585?thread=100569&skip=4180&show=20
The Brit Eng thread, from a while back, where I posted a piece - not quite a poem - about some of the "many confusing variations in spelling and pronunciation"

Supercalifragilisticexpialadotious?

I always thought that was "-ocious", but who am I to say.

Spiph

I was guessing at 9-year-old Gnomon's spelling (rational).

Back to the backlog:

"Swimming quickly is good for you"

Surely "quickly" still has to be an adverb here. "Swimming" has to be (standing in for) the infinitive of the verb (It is good for you to swim quickly). Translating into French or some other European languages the infinitive is what you'd choose for "swimming" (schwimmen, nager).

Quick swimming is good for you -- there it's a noun, with an adjective.

You can see where we're having problems:

Taking the daughter through the revision aids on English, we got to

"Pronoun - stands in place of a noun"

Easy enough - she's familiar with these from French. She even remarked how much learning a foreign langauge helped her with her English grammar.

Next up - "Proverb"

"Oh!" she goes "Is that a word that stands in place of a verb, then?"

I'm still concerned about this dog I mean, is it still barking now? what breed was it, and where was its owner? its not bene left alone desserted has it? I've missed soemthing havne't i?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night.

*gets quite worried for hte dog Was it? was it a was it a labrador?

'Tis dogs' delight to bark and bite
And birds' delight to sing
And if you sit on a red-hot brick
'Tis the sign of an early Spring.

Im convinced that in 50 years time the apostrophe (') will only be used for plural's, instead of for possessive's as it is now. We shouldve foreseen this, really. Its not as if we couldnt see it coming. How many time's have you seen apostrophe's used like this? I know, it sound's stupid to us now. (and I know thats not a plural, either...maybe theres a third way to use apostrophe's)

RF

Lewis Carroll put them everywhere a letter was elided (ca'n't) and Bernard Shaw put them nowhere (cant)

My opinion of this guide* is falling rapidly: it gives "the puffy clouds" as an example of a metaphor , and one of the exercises is to add prefixes or suffixes to the following words to change their meanings:


end
run
tract


*Not hootoo - the 11+ guidelines I found on the oh-so-reliable interweb.

What's really sad is that the questions & answers in the actual test will probably contain errors too.
Questions can be sufficiently ambiguous that a clever child will give an accurate answer that will be marked wrong because it isn't the expected one.