Eigentümlichkeiten der englische Sprache
A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, haberdashers don't haberdash, hammers don't ham, and humdingers don't humding.
Dearest Creatures in Creation
Studying English pronunciation
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corp, horse and worse
It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy
[...]River, rival; tomb, comb, bomb;
Doll and roll, and some and home.
Stranger does not rime with anger
Neither does devour with clangour.
[...]
If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few:
- heard – beard
- road – broad
- five – give
- early – dearly
- ache – moustache
- low – how
- scour – four
- break – speak
[...] But in English pronunciation is so various – one might say random – that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy [...] most famously in the letter cluster ough, which can be pronounced in any of eight ways as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough, and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced roughly as the latter).
Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thoughts, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. James Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant just that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.