| "Peter Piper" | |
|---|---|
 Illustration from Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation (1836 American ed.) | |
| Nursery rhyme | |
| Published | 1813 |
"Peter Piper" is an English-language nursery rhyme and well-known alliteration tongue-twister. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19745. [1]
The traditional version, as published in John Harris' Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation in 1813, is:
Common modern versions include:
The earliest version of this tongue-twister was published in Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation by John Harris (1756–1846) in London in 1813, which includes a one-name tongue-twister for each letter of the alphabet in the same style. However, the rhyme was apparently known at least a generation earlier. [3] Some authors have identified the subject of the rhyme as Pierre Poivre, an eighteenth‑century French horticulturalist and government administrator of Mauritius, who once investigated the Seychelles' potential for spice cultivation. [4] [5]
The Peter Piper Principle is a cognitive error that people make, where they tend to confuse two words that resemble each other; in particular, when the first letter(s) are the same. Studies have shown that this applies when people confuse the names of other people (although other tendencies also apply). [6] [7]
Novelists are well aware of the peril of giving two characters names that start with the same letter, because readers have a tendency to get them confused. [8] [9] Names of medications also tend to be confused when they start with the same few letters. [10]
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Greek ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.
A tongue twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken word game. Additionally, they can be used as exercises to improve pronunciation and fluency. Some tongue twisters produce results that are humorous when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value.
Nadsat is a fictional register or argot used by the teenage gang members in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a linguist and he used this background to depict his characters as speaking a form of Russian-influenced English. The name comes from the Russian suffix equivalent of -teen as in thirteen. Nadsat was also used in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the book.
The is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. The is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers.
Alliteration is the repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels, if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. It is often used as a literary device. An example is the quote "Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising" from Lord of the Rings.
Although people in many parts of the world share common alphabets and numeral systems, styles of handwritten letterforms vary between individuals, and sometimes also vary systematically between regions.
Black pepper is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The fruit is a drupe (stonefruit) which is about 5 mm (0.20 in) in diameter, dark red, and contains a stone which encloses a single pepper seed. Peppercorns and the ground pepper derived from them may be described simply as pepper, or more precisely as black pepper, green pepper, or white pepper.
Non-native pronunciations of English result from the common linguistic phenomenon in which non-native speakers of any language tend to transfer the intonation, phonological processes and pronunciation rules of their first language into their English speech. They may also create innovative pronunciations not found in the speaker's native language.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilized:
The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is ⟨ɮ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K\.
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
Beginner Books is the Random House imprint for young children ages 3–9, co-founded by Phyllis Cerf with Ted Geisel, more often known as Dr. Seuss, and his wife Helen Palmer Geisel. Their first book was Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat (1957), whose title character appears in the brand's logo. Cerf compiled a list of 379 words as the basic vocabulary for young readers, along with another 20 slightly harder "emergency" words. No more than 200 words were taken from that list to write The Cat in the Hat. Subsequent books in the series were modeled on the same requirement.
The pronunciation of the digraph ⟨wh⟩ in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced, the same as a plain initial ⟨w⟩, although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation, generally realized as, a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical has become in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger. It is also referred to as glide cluster reduction.
Pierre Poivre was an 18th-century horticulturist and botanist. He was born in Lyon, France.
"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck" is an American English-language tongue-twister. The woodchuck, a word originating from Algonquian "wejack", is a kind of marmot, regionally called a groundhog. The complete beginning of the tongue-twister usually goes: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" The tongue-twister relies primarily on alliteration to achieve its effects, with five "w" sounds interspersed among five "ch" sounds, as well as 6 "ood" sounds.
Hangul (Korean: 한글) is the native script of Korea. It was created in the mid fifteenth century by King Sejong, as both a complement and an alternative to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja. Initially denounced by the educated class as eonmun, it only became the primary Korean script following independence from Japan in the mid-20th century.
"All in the golden afternoon" is the preface poem in Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The introductory poem recalls the afternoon that he improvised the story about Alice in Wonderland while on a boat trip from Oxford to Godstow, for the benefit of the three Liddell sisters: Lorina Charlotte, Alice Pleasance, and Edith Mary. Alice gave her name to Carroll's main character.
Peter Piper is a nursery rhyme.
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl (조선글) in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features; similarly, the vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system. It has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems.
When an author has given names beginning with the same letter to more than one character, this can confuse readers.
Novelists are well aware of the peril of giving two characters names that start with the same letter because readers have a tendency to get them confused.
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Peter Piper public domain audiobook at LibriVox 