Chaucer and "found in translation"
Once upon a time, English pronunciation became unhinged from the written word. But it wasn’t always the case, and Chaucer’s poetry seems to unveil the original logic in spelling. First I must pay tribute to Geoffrey Chaucer, and secondly to David Crystal for elucidating this for me. 1
Taking the first four lines of the Canterbury Tales prologue, Crystal first reads with a modern English pronunciation and the rhymes don’t work at all. He then reads it again with a middle English accent and the end rhymes work perfectly. This can appear really odd as the written words often give no real clue as to their pronunciation. licour and flour would not rhyme in modern English, but they do in middle English, and it sounds great wonderful.
There is something that can aid us, a phonetic alphabet and it can help make English pronunciation and spelling make a little more sense. Known as the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), it corresponds sounds and letters, phonemes and graphemes. Apar from the video that I link to, you can see the sound/spelling relationship here:
From Chaucer’s Prolougue to The Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed ever veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour.
Might look like this when written with the IPA.
hwαn θɑt april wiθ his ̌su:rəs so:tə
θə dru:xt ɔf marč haθ pɛrsəd to: θə ro:tə
αnd bα:ðəd ɛvri vɛɪn in swɪč lɪku:r
ɔf hwič vɛrtiʊ ɛnjɛndrəd is θə flu:r
Even though, if you haven’t seen the IPA before and perhaps if you have, it may appear a bit like gobbledegook, you can still get a visual taste of the rhyme via the IPA: just look at the last word in each line and see how rhyming pairs of syllables are used, such as tə and tə and then u:r and uːr.
Clearly, something went wrong, and the Great Vowel Shift had a big part to play in that, oh and also the invention of the printing press.