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Dearest creature
in creation,
Studying English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer.
Pray console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it.
Just compare
heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say - said, pay - paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I durely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say break, steak, but bleak and streak.
Previous,
precious; fuchsia, via;
Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir;
Cloven, oven; how and low;
Script, receipt; shoe, poem, toe,
Hear me say, devoid of trickery:
Daughter, laughter and terpsichore;
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles;
Exiles, similes, reviles;
Wholly, holly, signal, signing;
Thames, examining, combining.
Scholar, vicar
and cigar;
Solar, mica, war and far;
From desire-desirable; admirable from admire;
Lumber, plumber; bier but brier;
Chatham, brougham; renown but known;
Knowledge, done but gone and tone:
One, anemone, Balmoral;
Kitchen, litchen; laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German; wind and mind;
Scene, Melpomene; mankind;
Tortoise, torquoise, chamois - leather;
Reading, reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic
labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth and plinth.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like would and should.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which is said to rhyme with "darky",
Viscous, viscount; Load and broad;
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your
pronunciation's OK
When you say correctly croquet;
Rounded, wounded; grieve and sieve;
Friend and fiend; alive and live;
Liberty, library, heave and heaven;
Rachel, ache, moustache; eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed;
People, leopard; towed but vowed.
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