Language Joy

A few weeks ago, I ran across this British tongue twister. I don’t remember who wrote it or where I found it, but visually it’s delightful and I had to share it with you all. Some of the words may puzzle us Americans, but that’s part of the fun.

Here goes:

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.

 

With so many variants and idiosyncratic pronunciations, it’s small wonder the English language is considered hard to learn! (Incidentally, in the USA, we spell it hiccup instead of hiccough.) (As for slough, in England the pronunciation rhymes with our plow–which the Brits spell as plough–but in the American south, slough rhymes with you.)

Why all the confusion, you may be wondering? Because after the War of 1812, the U.S. Congress hired Daniel Webster to change as many spellings as possible to help differentiate America from Great Britain. We rely on Webster’s Dictionary, and they have the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus, we became two nations separated by the same language.