Charivarius and the chaos of English pronunciation

Per quelli di voi troppo pigri per verificare la corretta pronuncia parola per parola.

Gerard Nolst Trenité

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité ( 20 July 1870, Utrecht - 9 October 1946, Haarlem), was a Dutch observer of English. Nolst Trenité published under the pseudonym Charivarius (which he pronounced irregularly as [ʃariˈvariəs]^[1]).  While the pronunciation of his own surname is not obvious (possibly the original French [tʁəniˈte]), he is best known in the English-speaking world for his poem The Chaos which demonstrates many of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and first appeared as an appendix to his 1920 textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen.^[2] The subtitle of the book means "English pronunciation exercises" (this title has the pre-1947 Dutch spelling “engelsche” instead of “Engelse” currently).^[2]