It is perhaps only natural that a language made up of so many hetero geneous elements as is our own should abound in curiosities not to be found in a language whose development was little influenced by outside sources, or in a scientifically constructed tongue like Esperanto or Volapuk. Certain it is that a knowledge of these curiosities brings with it something of fascination and serves to endear to us our curious old language, says Harold M. Haskett in the Sunday Magazine.
Noticeable is the fact that words which rhyme perfectly may have altogether different terminations, as the words “gneiss” and “mice,” and that words which terminate similarly not infrequently fail to rhyme, as in the case of “brides” and “cantharides.”
In “suspicion,” “remission,” and “contrition" we have three words in which the final "ion" is preceded in each case by a different consonant; but, as the T and C both take the sound of S, these words all rhyme perfectly. Further investigation reveals the interesting fact that, whereas there is a great variety of words ending in "tion" and “sion,” only five bear the termination “cion.” These five are “scion,” “coercion,” “suspicion,” “epinicion,” and “internecion.” “Epinicion," meaning a song of victory, and “internecion,” meaning slaughter, are not in common use; but the other three words are familiar to all. It is perhaps worthy of remark that of words bearing the phonetically similar ending “tion” there are over one hundred examples.
The termination “dous” is, however, even more exclusive than “cion,” as it is borne by just four English words. These are “stupendous,” “tremendous,” “hazardous,” and “horrendous.” Curiously; all the words in this latter group are adjectives, while the former group is composed entirely of nouns.
It seems somewhat strange to speak of beheading a word of one syllable and leaving a word of two syllables; but there are several monosyllables that admit of this possibility. If we behead either “caged,” “raged,” or "waged," used as monosyllables, we have the word “aged,” which, when used as an adjective, is pronounced with two syllables. “Staged,” twice beheaded, leaves the same result. Better yet, behead “vague” or “Hague” or twice behead “plague,” and we have “ague,” which admits of only bisyllabic pronunciation. Likewise “shrugged” twice beheaded leaves the different word “rugged.”
There are over thirteen hundred words in our language ending with the long E sound, such as “tre,” etc.; but even this remarkable showing is eclipsed by words ending in “ess,” as there are fourteen hundred of these.
From the citation of these two cases it might be inferred that the poet has a sinecure to select a rhyme for any word he chooses to employ; but such is not always the case. Exclusive of the ordinal numerals, most of which are unrhymeable, there are more than sixty words that have no rhyme. Well-known examples of these include such words as “gulf,” “month,” “orange,” "scarce," “silver,” "window," "warmth," “spoilt,” and “wasp.”
It is perhaps not generally known that there is a verse in the Bible that contains all but one of the letters of the alphabet. This, however, is a fact, as in the twenty-first verse of the seventh chapter of Job are found all the letters but J. This is of course purely a coincidence; for, as the verse contains forty-three words and one hundred and seventy-three letters, it would be unworthy of note if done by design.
While our language does not contain such long words as are found in some other tongues, nor so many words of unusual length, still we have several that are awkwardly long for conversational purposes. We have “philoprogenitiveness," with twenty letters; “interconvertibilities,” with twenty-one; "intercommunicabilities" with twenty-two, "disproportionablenesses" with twenty-three, "transubstantiationalists" and "contradistinguishability," each containing twenty-four. But how insignificant are all these compared with the Dutch "Albasserdammerlandarenopsteckersvergaderinlokaal!" An effective little word is “synacategorematic,” as it manages to compress eight syllables into seventeen letters.
The longest monosyllables contain nine letters, and there are four examples: “splotched,” “squelched,” “strengths,” and “stretched.”
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