Carrie Dear,
It is not often that we can understand that the same facility that allows us to make puns in the English language also provides us with endless opportunities to mangle that same language beyond practical repair. Your wonderful little poem shows us a few of those examples, with those troubling homophones that drive all those English-as-a-Second-Language folks crazy. How troubling it must be to attempt to make sense out of our language when one’s native language may be “highly regular”in its spelling and orthography. You and I, Carrie, may love this wild and insane melange that is called English; this amalgam of North European languages, with its maddening tendency to borrow and adopt words from other languages just because it makes sense to do so. The end result is magnificently rich in variety and nuance, without the stodginess and lumbering affectations of some other languages. But it has to be an absolute bear to learn as a foreigner.
Some years ago I read a piece in a magazine (I believe it was called Quinto Lingo) in which a student was trying to grasp this exasperating thing called English. He would read the sentence that began, “He says...” and he would say “says,” as though the word rhymed with “rays.” And his teacher would correct him by saying “sez.” So when he read about the sun’s rays later he said the “sun’s rez.” And his teacher would scream, “Rays!” And he would think about her saying, “He sez” just a moment before and the mystery of English grew even deeper, when a word spelled quite the same now was pronounced as “raise.” The piece concluded by saying "it sure pays to pez attention,” or something like that.
Other languages do not have that kind of problem. Russian, for example is so highly regular, that spelling is almost never a problem. If you can pronounce the word, you can spell it. And while I am not exactly sure, I believe that Russian does not have homophones (witch, which, etc.) as we do in English.
A friend of mine, who spoke a bit of Russian, went into a restaurant with his family. The hostess asked him if he had a reservation. He told her that he did not have a reservation. She said, “If you give me your name I can write it down and we’ll call you when we have a table ready for you.” He seemed to think that was agreeable. So he said, “My name is Myagki Znak Irkratkoija.” The hostess blanched. “What did you say your name was?” He repeated, “My name is Myagki Znak Irkratkoija.” She said, “Er, ah, h..how do you spell that?” He said, “It’s spelled just like it sounds.” What makes this funny to English-speakers is the wild impossibility of that tongue-twister name ever being spelled “just like it sounds.” But almost every native Russian speaker could spell those words without any trouble (Note: please excuse my poor transliteration of the Russian here).
I liked your delightful little poem, Carrie, and I’m glad that you wrote it and shared it with us. It makes a more significant point about language than you may well suspect. Way to go, girl!
UB
