Polish Vowel Sounds

POLISH DIVORCE

A Polish man moved to the USA and married an American girl. Although his English was far from perfect, they got along very well until one day he rushed into a lawyer's office and asked him if he could arrange a divorce for him -"very quick." The lawyer said that the speed for getting a divorce would depend on the circumstances, and asked him the following questions:
LAWYER: "Have you any grounds?" POLE: "JA, JA, acre and half and nice little home."LAWYER: "No," I mean what is the foundation of this case?" POLE: "It made of concrete." LAWYER: "Does either of you have a real grudge?" POLE: "No, we have carport, and not need one." LAWYER: "I mean, What are your relations like?" POLE: "All my relations still in Poland." LAWYER: "Is there any infidelity in your marriage?" POLE: "Ja, we have hi- fidelity stereo set and good DVD player." LAWYER: "Does your wife beat you up?" POLE: "No, I always up before her." LAWYER: "Is your wife a nagger?" POLE: "No, she white." LAWYER: "WHY do you want this divorce?" POLE: "She going to kill me."LAWYER: "What makes you think that?" POLE: "I got proof." LAWYER: "What kind of proof?" POLE: "She going to poison me. She buy a bottle at drugstore and put on shelf in bathroom I can read, and it say, 'Polish Remover.'"

By the way, I have many good friends who are Polish so this is all in good fun.

Onomatopoeias Zipping Past

This morning while driving my son to school, he mentioned that yesterday was National Zipper Day. While I think all the various "National whatever days" are really silly, it did get me thinking about the word zipper. Zipper is a really cool sounding word because it sounds like what it does; zip clothing closed quickly. Words that sound like what they do are called onomatopoeias. Zip originally meant "to move quickly" because zip is thought to resemble the sound something makes when it moves quickly, thus it is onomatopoeic. Interestingly, zipper did not become the name of the fastener that we know by that name until it was trademarked in 1925 by the B. F. Goodrich Company, who used the fastener on rubber boots. And it wasn't until the fastener was trademarked that the word zip acquired its verbal definition of closing something with a zipper.

Some other onomatopoeias: buzz, hiss, fizz, boom, crackle, kerplunk, smack, whizz, whoosh, bang

Phonetics and George Bernard Shaw

Because of the inconsistencies in English language spelling and word pronunciation, when George Bernard Shaw died in 1950 he left money in his will to develop a new phonemic alphabet. The Shaw Alphabet contains 48 letters and each letter represents one individual sound.

Think about this - how would you pronounce the word ghoti?

This is the spelling that Bernard Shaw suggested be used for the word fish to demonstrate the inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation. He suggested this spelling based on the [gh] from "laugh", the [o] from "women" and the [ti] from "nation".

The preferred phonetic alphabet today is the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. The IPA consists of 43 symbols for the sounds of American English and additional symbols for the sounds of other languages.