You are saying-g it wrong-g

Mrs Hawkins was my teacher for the first year of junior school* in Windsor. She was from Lancashire and she had very strict ideas about correct pronunciation. I was about 8 at the time so I don't remember all the details, but I do remember her clear instructions on 'ng.

She: "How do you spell 'doing'?"
Pupil: "D O I N G"
She: "Is there a G at the end of doing?"
Pupil: "Yes Miss. There is a G at the end of doing."
She: "Then why don't you pronounce it?"

She would then proceed to reel off a lot of 'ing' words, sounding the G separately with each one: thinking-g, saying-g, going-g, writing and so on..

She may well have corrected our 'incorrect' pronunciation of words such as 'bath', 'but', 'come', 'late'. Nearly 60 years later, I don't remember. What I do know is that it made little difference to how her pupils spoke.

Having studied a number of languages since then, and having taught English to Ukrainian and Syrian refugees for the last three years, I realise just how little use English spelling is as a guide to English pronunciation.

This is a source regular disagreements on pronuncation with a woman who is near and dear to me. Despite having grown up in Windsor, I pronounce the 'r' in words such as bar, car, far and part. Said woman grew up in Herefordshire but benefited from a private school education, so she regards my rhotic r as an affectation and pronounces such words: ba, ca, fa and paht.

If you were to show me a piece of writing with unfamiliar words in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek or even Ukrainian, I would be confident of pronouncing them correctly. If I weren't a native English speaker, I don't think I could undertake such an exercise with confidence.

* There were three years of primary school and four years of junior school.