Gerard Nolst Trenité

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 [tʁɛniˈte]), 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.[1] The subtitle of the book means "English pronunciation exercises", but uses the pre-1947 Dutch spelling instead of current engelse.[2][1]

References

  1. ^ a b Upward, Chris (2004). "The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos". The Spelling Society. http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php. Retrieved 2008-06-04. 
  2. ^ "engelse uitspraakoefeningen". Google translate. http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#auto|en. Retrieved 4 January 2012.