The Chaos (1922)

A well deserved slap in the face of the English language, delivered with splendor.

I would love to listen to an Eminem rendition of this poem as a rap.

But it says little about the English language proper, things like syntax, the system of verb tenses, or even phonetics. It's only about the spelling, and specifically the hodgepodge of various historical spellings, and the tendency to import a word with its foreign spelling and foreign pronunciation. Chunks of Romance languages, mostly Latin and French, stick out as especially noticeable: things like "bona fide", or "corps", or even "beauty".

Most languages in which the connection between the written form and the sound is straightforward, like Spanish or Japanese, import foreign words by writing down the sound and ignoring the original spelling. The problem is that in Britain, French was directly spoken and written for centuries, and for a person who speaks and writes French daily, it would be rather jarring to write "bohteh" instead of "beauté" or "ko" instead of "corps". To have a taste of that, trai tu rait inglish fonetikalli. It's an attempt to avoid that what has driven us to the current situation.

It is /bæd/ vs /meɪd/ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/bade

Reading and writing are different transformations - they are not complementary or inverse - they are just different.

Phonics gives you some clues to remember a word, context gives you other clues. Eventually, you may learn what kinds of words come from Latin, Greek, and French, and those are more clues. But before those clues do anything at all for you, you have to care and want to read.

Four righting ewe jest halve two remmemmber thee spellin.

> "There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read."

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ (and hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 )

> "Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name?"

Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lucy-ca...