I’ve said before that if you grew up speaking English you are one of the lucky ones, because it’s a mighty difficult language to learn as a second language. Trying to get the pronunciation right is a nightmare for most foreign learners.

All the more surprising, then, that it was a Dutch writer who composed an excellent poem about the subject.

Born in 1870, Dr Gerard Nolst Trenité, writer and traveller, was a keen observer of the English language. He wrote the famous poem The Chaos in which he illustrates the many idiosyncrasies of the English vocabulary. So many words that are spelled the same are pronounced differently or are spelled differently but pronounced the same.

The writer used the pseudonym Charivarius and addressed his poem to Suzy, who was Miss Susanne Delacruix, Paris, presumably one of Nolst Trenité’s students. He writes from the viewpoint of the foreign learner of English, warning of the pitfalls.

The poem has 274 lines and includes around 800 examples of the most notorious irregularities of spelling. Here is the first verse:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

Because it was written over a hundred years ago, some words are less familiar nowadays, such as a studding-sail, pronounced ‘stunsail’.

Here’s another verse which shows the madness of words that look alike but don’t sound alike:

Shoes, goes, does, Now first say: finger;
Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age.

Many native English-speaking readers will find the poem a revelation: the examples in each verse bring home the sheer illogicality of the writing system in ways that we English speakers have taken for granted.

Happy Puzzling!