It's May, the swallows are finally arriving, and so too are the incoming wave of au pairs and language students, anxious to learn the most widely spoken second language in the world. An Irishman's Diary is happy to give you visitors some linguistic assistance, because, my friends, you'll need it.
Because I don't know why friends is pronounced frends, rather than with the diphthong pronounced, as it is with fiends. If "ie" can have two different sounds in words which differ by merely a single consonant, what other mysterious sounds can it invoke, my little foreigners? Well, to start with, it can come in the shape of an "ee" sound, in liege and siege. Or it can come as a long "i" sound, as in lie. Start with the letter "s" and the "ie" becomes a short "i" as in sieve. And if you want to discover the true meaning of misery, try to work out how the "ie" of lieutenant, added and abetted by a maverick "u", produces an an "ef" noise here, in Britain and in Canada, and an "oo" noise in the US.
Insane spelling
Do you want some more? Or would you rather go home? I'd love to explain to you why home doesn't rhyme with some, but I can't, any more than I can tell you why comb doesn't rhyme with bomb, and neither rhymes with womb, though that does rhyme with tomb, which is probably where you want to go if you have to endure any more of the insanity of English spelling.
The curious thing is that it doesn't seem to cause much difficulty for native English speakers. Show a 10-year-old a sentence such as, "They combed the tomb looking for a womb-like bomb," and the little minx will probably get it thoroughly correct. But even she - I yuse the femail pronown advisedly: gurls being so much sharper than boise - might have trouble with the "ough" sound, the Innglish langwage's gratest contribution to wurld sivilisation.
Though the tough was thoroughly through with the trough made from the bough of a tree, he thought to slough off responsibility and then take enough furlough to swim in the lough. Now frankly my littul deers, I think at this point you wood be well within your rites to abandon the Innglish langwaje and lurn Eskimo insted.
It's not just that English uses the same letters to convey wildly different sounds; it uses identically-appearing words with different pronunciations, which can sumtimes sownd just like wurds with entirely different spellings. To giv yew an example: take the word "bow". What does it mean? Well, if you put it beside arrow, it rhymes with hoe and doe and it means a stringed weapon for propelling a pointed missile. Put it to sea, and it rhymes with how and now, and it becomes the forrard part of a vessel.
Misfortunate
But, my tiny forrin tots, we are ownly beginng the voyaj of discuvvery. For if you herd the sounds, "The yeoman was now thrown off the bow and was soon drowned", you could assume that the misfortunate was on a ship and dropped into the sea. But what if the unfortunate yeoman were climbing a tree over a pond? Then what happened was: "He fell off the bough and was drowned." So, logically, allowing for the promiscuity with which the "ough" quatrain allows itself to be pronounced, this could be spelled: "The youghman was nough throughn ough the bough and was soughn droughned."
Mite you be feeling unwell, my mity mites? You have every reason to, coming from lands where they order languages sensibly, where your spelling proceeds as logically as do your numbers, uno, due, tres, un, deux, trois, eins, zwei, drei, uno, dos, tres. Nobuddy lukking at those numbers would be in any dowt how they are spelt. Take cuvver; here comes Innglish.
One is pronounced not as "own", as you might think from "stone"; not as "onn", as "gone" suggests: not as "unn" as "done " is dun. It has acquired an entirely invisible consonant to start off with, a "w", conjured out of the linguistic bloo. It sounds exactly the same as "won". That's the oneder of the English language; but it gets mor onederful still, for now we cum to, yess, the secund number.
Commonsense
How is "two" pronounced? Well, just as the number "one" has gained an unspelt "w" out of nowhere, "two" has lost that same letter. Maybe they did a simple swap. The outcome is "two", pronounced "to". Happily, three is spelt three, and tho four is spelt four, in line with the prinsipal of ganing or lewzing a yoo-sounding letter for no reason, when it gets older, four becomes forty. Five, six and seven are modles of commonsense: and then we come to eight, for which I can offer no explanation and only hartfelt apologies, menewhile pointing a trembling finger of accewsashun at that nefarious villun, the "gh" couplet.
Why should the number eight be identical in sound with ate, when all they have in common is the letter "t"? And how can "eight" also be pronounced identically as "eat" when the latter is in the past tense? What is this, please: a language or a brothel? Eight, ate, eat: all sound the same. But not when you add an "h" to the first, and then you get height. And for all ate's vocative consistency, its doublet "eat" retains its "e" sound in heathen, but not in heather.
Whaught argh yough doughing hear? Gough homb.