If there's any truth to My Fair Lady then English tutors who taught people proper pronunciation liked to use clever poems as training tools, which would make the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenite the ultimate tongue trainer:
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer...
Miss C first posted about "The Chaos" back in 2010, a poem which was written in 1922 to demonstrate how ridiculously difficult proper English language pronunciation can be.
And now we have a video example to help guide us through the over 100 lines of pronunciatin' pain.
Read "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenite in its entirety here
-Via The Poke