English....arrgghh!!

Trying to get into the skin of the English language? You better catch it fast else it will change its skin before your eyes! If French is definite as solid, English is formless as liquid. We read it in the lower classes, liquid takes the shape of a container. Likewise, English takes the shape of time and place. English language could undergo distinguishable changes over a simple span of a year's time. So, if you are an English language enthusiast brace yourself well to master the language. It involves some extra efforts of learning and unlearning in the process.

I can already see Rupashi who is striving in this direction wholeheartedly. She is picking up the nitty-gritty of the language under the tutelage of some of the most skillful language-specialists. She improved vastly since she took up her current offer with IBM Daksh, Gurgaon. I am glad I met her over a morning cup of tea, she revealed the subtle differences between 3 specific alphabets and how to pronounce them accurately. Those 3 are J as in Juliet, Z as in Zebra and the 'S' in the word 'pleasure'. It was fun doing tongue-xercise! Here's a few gems of the English language. Quite important they are!

• Homophenes - words have different spelling and meanings but the same sound - heir, air, sun, son.
• Homonyns - words spelt and pronounced alike but mean different things - hand, cricket

There's more! Add to this is the irrational and idiosyncratic nature of English spellings. It bears no logical relation to speech. The problem arises because the number of graphenemes (written symbols) does not correlate with their number of phoemes (sounds) in the English language. The 26 letters of the alphabet cover 47 phonemes (according to COD).

Sometimes one phoneme can be represented by more than one graphene. Hence, Bernard Shaw's famous analogy that the word 'fish' can be written as 'ghoti' and still be pronounced 'fish'!
-'gh' in words like rough and laugh has the 'f' sound.
-'o' in women has the 'i' sound
- 'ti' in nation and ration has the 'sh' sound

Besides these inconsistencies, there are the silent letters which complicate English spellings - 'h' as in hour and honor, psychology and pneumonia, or debt and doubt or calm and palm.

Best of luck to all of you with your English :-)