One of the things I like about the French language is that, if you know the basic rules of pronunciation, you can read aloud anything, even if you don’t have the slightest clue what you’re saying. (I did this in Quebec once, when I was pulled from the audience to participate in an outdoor play by reading a town crier announcement at the top of my lungs. The mostly French-speaking audience knew exactly what I was saying, even though I had no idea.) You see a word like fromage or chapeau or regarder, and you know precisely how it should be pronounced. I took this language from the United Nations Web site:

Pour engager le XXIe siècle sous de bons auspices, les États Membres des Nations Unies sont convenus de huit objectifs essentiels à atteindre d’ici à 2015.

Even if you cannot translate it, anyone who has taken enough French to know how each of these letters is supposed to sound and what the accents mean can read this out loud.

Now let’s look at our own language. Four of my favorite words to compare are:

• tough (ˈtəf)
• though (ˈthō)
• through (’thrü)
• thought (ˈthȯt)

You add or change one letter each time, and the ough dramatically changes the way it is pronounced. Very simply, there’s no logic to it whatsoever–that’s just the way it is.

How are young spellers supposed to learn that although tough and rough rhyme, cough and dough look like they should but are not even close? And if the ough in tough, rough, and cough is pronounced with an -f sound at the end (never mind that the ou sounds entirely different in cough), why is it that we doff our caps instead of doughing them?

Fortunately, in the United States we have turned plough into plow. And we’ve pretty much abandoned hiccough, in which the gh, as one logically would expect, makes a -p sound.

Earlier today, I came across the Family Genealogy Forum for the Ough family, who undoubtedly are experts on this issue. Perhaps someone from the Ough family could shed some light on the true pronunciation of ough.

But enough.