Some thoughts on the dreaded 'ough' words. This is one of those areas where it is very easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. Morewords.com (they list words for Scrabble (r) etc), list 290 words including the cluster 'ough', but if you take away all the derivatives, you're left with less than 40. This is what AnWulf's 8 to the 8th power (16,777,216) boils down to:

When 'ough' doesn't come at the end of the syllable (usually being followed by t) it is invariably pronounced 'aw' - bought, ought, thought, brougham

Apart from a couple of exceptions, where 'ough' comes at the end of the syllable there are basically six possible sounds. I've listed the words roughly as to how common they are:

'oh' - though, although, dough, furlough
'uff' - enough, rough, tough, chough, clough, slough (1)
'off' - cough, trough
'ow' - bough, plough (BrE), slough (2)
'er (the schwa)' - borough, thorough
'oo' - through, breakthrough etc

exceptions - hiccoughs (usually hiccups nowadays), lough (Irish - like Scottish loch), and the very rare sough, which has two possible pronunciations.

Some of these words are very high frequency, so students see them often and learn them quickly, eg: though, enough, rough, tough, through

A few are middle to low frequency, and can give students problems the first time they see them - dough, bough, plough (AmE - plow), trough, borough, thorough (more commonly thoroughly) - that last one my students do find difficult the first time they come across it, but soon get the hang of it.

The rest are so low-frequency that they don't really matter - none of them are in the top 10,000 most frequently used words, and students can always check with a dictionary if they need to.

Some sounds, for example 'off' and 'er' really only have a couple of words each. If you take that into consideration, you can more or less ignore them as a possibility when looking at new words. One, 'oo', really only has 'through' and its derivatives.

So what about those rarer ones. Those of us who've ever done any birdwatching (a particularly British pastime) will know how to pronounce chough, which more or less leaves clough and the two versions of slough (plus Slough, for Brits). Has anyone reading this ever had the occasion to use either of these words (apart from the place name)? Does their spelling really pose any threat to anyone's literacy? I doubt it. But it always looks good when you choose an extreme example.

On the other hand, if you take a positive and more realistic approach, even 'ough' becomes rather less daunting.

But back to slough or rather to Slough. Slough (pronounced like 'ow') is a rather characterless town to the west of London. It was the setting for the (original) British mockumentary series 'The Office' and in his eponymous poem, John Betjeman wrote "Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough, It isn't fit for humans now.".

AnWulf's remark reminded me of an old Punch joke - a chauffeur (apparently a Cockney) is driving a rather posh young lady through Slough, on the way somewhere else, Reading or Henley, perhaps. I's rush hour and there's rather a lot of traffic. The young lady says to the chauffeur, "This is Slough, isn't it?", and the chauffeur replies, "Yes Miss, very."

(In broad Cockney, the 'oh' sound - /əʊ/ (as in 'slow') is/was often pronounced 'ow' - /aʊ/, as in Slough)

What about "How many weetabixes did you have for breakfast?" or "I had quite a lot of Dinkies when I was young" (Dinky cars). I think I'd say the first but probably not the second.

Correction - I was forgetting about Ngram and capitalisation. Judging by Ngram, The Argentine was the more popular form in both Britain and North America up to around 1900. It continued to be used in British English but has been decreasing in popularity since 1940ish. I think it's considered pretty old-fashioned these days.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=The+Argentine%2CArgentina%2Cthe+Argentine&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CThe%20Argentine%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CArgentina%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthe%20Argentine%3B%2Cc0

Gus's book, the Angus's car, Andrus's bike shop. You'll find plenty examples of "the Angus's" in Google.

The only people who have the 's regularly dropped after s are biblical figures, or figures from antiquity. So I don't think bridgwaterblitz's Jesus' tomb example was particularly valid, as this is usually regarded as an exception.

Lets look at Argentina first. When I was young it was sometimes called The Argentine (to rhyme with the River Tyne), but according to Ngram, this was always a minority usage, especially in BrE. Its official name in English (as used by the Argentinian government) is still The Argentine Republic, and although the people are probably usually referred to in English as Argentinians, Argentine seems to be used quite a lot as an attributive adjective - the Argentine economy etc (including or even especially by Latino-sounding authors).

Incidentally, Argentinian is no less English than Argentine, perhaps even more so. The Spanish is Argentino/a - "una chica argentina","el tango argentino". Argentine is arguably closer to the Spanish than Argentinian, but the '-an' ending is more typical of English. But if you can have a Pole and a Swede, why not an Argentine?

Incidentally, a couple of other countries seem to have dropped 'the' as well. It's still officially The Gambia, but seems to be more commonly named without 'The'. Before its independence, Ukraine was often referred to as The Ukraine, but the 'the'-less version now seems to be the preferred one. (If other Slavic languages are anything to go by, Ukrainian won't even have a word for 'the') .

On Anglicising country names in general - I suggest going with what's natural - where there's a generally used English name, use it. If I pronounced Paris as Paree or told you I lived in Warszawa in Polska you'd no doubt think I was being pretentious, and I'd agree with you. Apparently SpeakEnglandverydelicious wouldn't, however. If we went by his/her system I might describe my holiday thus:

"We went to Italia, to our little house near Firenze in Toscana, stopping off in Milano and Venezia as well as Lago di Como on the way" - Pretentious! Moi?

Now to sports etc - "England full-back" gets slightly more hits on Google than "English full-back". And I think I understand why - in these days of the internationalisation and commercialisation of of sport, the team name "England" has a stronger identity internationally than simply the nationality of the players. I see plenty of Poles wearing England T-shirts, for example.

Lastly, in Google search 'Syria crisis' just tops 'Syrian crisis', but at Google Books it's very different, with the adjective version well ahead of the noun. But I can see that it could be said that this crisis isn't simply a Syrian problem; it affects the whole region, hence the use of the noun.

It's too early for the current crisis in my next-door neighbour to make it into Ngram, but on Google, 'Ukraine crisis' has about 3 times as many hits as 'Ukrainian crisis' and 'Crimea crisis' about twice as many as 'Crimean crisis'. In contrast the 19th century conflict is invariably the 'Crimean war', not the 'Crimea war'. So perhaps we are seeing a shift.

Sorry, PITE split up that Ngram link for some reason, but it works if you paste it into the address bar.

It occurred to me after I had written my previous comment that the reason that less often gets used instead of fewer and not vice versa might be that in the vast majority of cases, even for strict grammarians, less is the opposite of more. I'm not concerned with right or wrong here, just why so many people (me included) often want (probably subconsciously) to say less rather than fewer.

For less is the opposite more when it is as a determiner before uncountable nouns here (more sugar / less sugar, more money / less money), as a determiner used in other ways (more of a problem / less of a problem, a bit less talking and a bit more work), as a pronoun (it cost more / less than last time) , and also as an adverb - 'more expensive / less expensive, to read more / less than before'.

As I said before, even if we used fewer on every occasion it 'should' be used, these occasions are fairly few and far between compared with less. Which might have lead to less becoming an almost automatic opposite to more. Just a thought.

@jayles - exactly, they are symbols with rather more information than just the sound.

AnWulf casts some doubts on the historical reasons I give for the anomalies in English spelling, and the size of the problem. He seems to avoid all mention, however, of the Great Vowel Shift, one of the biggest reasons for the anomalies, but then it's much more fun to blame it on Johnson.

So here are some of my sources, so that others can judge for themselves:

"By the mid-seventeenth century printers followed general principles of spelling much like the present ones." OED

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/

"By the late 1500s, under the impetus of printing the tremendous variety of spellings in written English had shaken down into a far smaller set of variants, and a great part of the outlines of the modern orthography was in place. Changes in orthographic norms slowed considerably, and Modern English was left with a spelling system from an earlier period of its history: essentially it is a normalized Middle English system. The result is a set of letter-to-sound mismatches [due to the Great Vowel Shift, WW] greater than those of elsewhere in Europe, even in some respects greater than those of French, whose spelling was codified a little later. " The History of English, Rice University

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html

"as David Crystal points out, there are only around 400 everyday words with totally irregular spelling – and it is precisely the fact that they are so frequently encountered that is the origin of the myth. One particular computer analysis of 17,000 words showed that 84% were spelled according to a regular pattern – and only 3% were so irregular that they have to be learned by heart." - Teflpedia (and because they're high frequency, people tend to know them - WW) - http://teflpedia.com/Spelling

"Today, most of out regular sound-symbol correspondences come from the Anglo-Saxon layer of language (for example, almost all consonant spellings). Ironically, most of our irregular spellings come from Anglo-Saxon as well" - How Spelling Supports Reading, Louisa Moats, American Federation of Teachers - excellent paper with specifics on how to teach children spelling - what and when.

http://www.aft.org%2Fpdfs%2Famericaneducator%2Fwinter0506%2FMoats.pdf (pdf)

"To summarize to this point, English is not as chaotic as it seems at first glance.
Skilled spellers have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to better understand and reduce the variability in written English. Knowledge about conservatism, loan-words, and how English spellings represent more than just pronunciation helps spellers understand why certain words are spelled in seemingly irregular ways. In addition, spellers can use information about position and context to help limit the many possible
alternative spellings that English provides for each sound."

English Spelling: Making Sense of a Seemingly Chaotic Writing System, by Heather Hayes, Brett Kessler, and Rebecca Treiman

Another quite detailed study, from Washington University in St. Louis

http://www.ldanh.org/docs/spellingenglish.pdf (pdf)

Their recommendations seem similar to those of Davis Crystal: not to teach children to spell, but rather how to spell - http://books.google.coml/books?id=XBZKMSX8MggC

@jayles - exactly, they are symbols with rather more information than just the sound.

AnWulf casts some doubts on the historical reasons I give for the anomalies in English spelling, and the size of the problem. He seems to avoid all mention, however, of the Great Vowel Shift, one of the biggest reasons for the anomalies, but then it's much more fun to blame it on Johnson.

So here are some of my sources, so that others can judge for themselves:

"By the mid-seventeenth century printers followed general principles of spelling much like the present ones." OED

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/

"By the late 1500s, under the impetus of printing the tremendous variety of spellings in written English had shaken down into a far smaller set of variants, and a great part of the outlines of the modern orthography was in place. Changes in orthographic norms slowed considerably, and Modern English was left with a spelling system from an earlier period of its history: essentially it is a normalized Middle English system. The result is a set of letter-to-sound mismatches [due to the Great Vowel Shift, WW] greater than those of elsewhere in Europe, even in some respects greater than those of French, whose spelling was codified a little later. " The History of English, Rice University

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html

"as David Crystal points out, there are only around 400 everyday words with totally irregular spelling – and it is precisely the fact that they are so frequently encountered that is the origin of the myth. One particular computer analysis of 17,000 words showed that 84% were spelled according to a regular pattern – and only 3% were so irregular that they have to be learned by heart." - Teflpedia (and because they're high frequency, people tend to know them - WW) - http://teflpedia.com/Spelling

"Today, most of out regular sound-symbol correspondences come from the Anglo-Saxon layer of language (for example, almost all consonant spellings). Ironically, most of our irregular spellings come from Anglo-Saxon as well" - How Spelling Supports Reading, Louisa Moats, American Federation of Teachers - excellent paper with specifics on how to teach children spelling - what and when.

http://www.aft.org%2Fpdfs%2Famericaneducator%2Fwinter0506%2FMoats.pdf (pdf)

"To summarize to this point, English is not as chaotic as it seems at first glance.
Skilled spellers have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to better understand and reduce the variability in written English. Knowledge about conservatism, loan-words, and how English spellings represent more than just pronunciation helps spellers understand why certain words are spelled in seemingly irregular ways. In addition, spellers can use information about position and context to help limit the many possible
alternative spellings that English provides for each sound."

English Spelling: Making Sense of a Seemingly Chaotic Writing System, by Heather Hayes, Brett Kessler, and Rebecca Treiman

Another quite detailed study, from Washington University in St. Louis

http://www.ldanh.org/docs/spellingenglish.pdf (pdf)

Their recommendations seem similar to those of Davis Crystal: not to teach children to spell, but rather how to spell - http://books.google.coml/books?id=XBZKMSX8MggC

@AnWulf - good rant, but it just ain't going to happen, so on my blog I've started to try and work out just how the spelling system works; I prefer to work with what we've got rather then change the world.

It's interesting how both your main interests on this forum involve radically changing the language (which a lot of us are rather fond of just as it is, thank you - if that makes us snobs so be it). As in most things, I'd rather my language was governed by natural evolution rather than by enforced revolution. And not mucked around with by fiat.

I like the fact that both the words we use and their spelling reflects the history of English, which unlike you, I feel no need to rewrite, and much of the spelling reflects its grammar and word family connections - something that would be lost if it went entirely phonetic - and which I can assure you, foreign learners would not thank you for.

As for 'o' in dog - OK, agreed, but that was what they said on the American-made cassette - and there is quite a difference between British and American pronunciation - American is rather longer.

Incidentally, I wonder, if hwich, why not hwy? In fact why not hwitch?

Regarding 'ough' words - I think I got there first (April 19) - and by the way, we sometimes use these poems to help students, not to put them off - in fact relatively few 'ough' words are used very often, and of those that are, some, lik ' though' and 'through' are so common that they pose few problems.

But end on a conciliatory note, as your last point is indeed evolutionary, and as I've already said as much, I'll agree with you on this one, but in the exact words you used - 'let them go' - not force them out.

@providencejim - Hi again. If we can ignore that 'in the real world bit'; that's just one of HS's little foibles. But in essence HS is right, there are a couple of differences between North American and British usage.

First of all, we don't graduate from secondary school (we leave or finish), only from university or other tertiary level institution.

Which is why university students taking ordinary degrees in Britain (and in North America, I think) are also known as under-graduates, and those doing masters or other higher level degrees are post-graduates or post-grads.

But I'd disagree with HS on one thing, where there are tertiary level colleges etc which aren't universities, you still graduate from them, for example The Royal College of Art, RADA, Guildhall School of Music and Drama. All of these institutions offer under-graduate and post-graduate courses. In effect they're honorary universities.

Secondly, it only works one way in British English - someone graduates from an institution (in something), but the institution never graduates someone. And in British English, we always 'graduate from' somewhere, we never 'graduate somewhere' , so the main question in this thread doesn't apply to us at all.

But I see I'm just repeating an earlier comment I made.

I hear, however, that 'high school' proms are beginning to catch on in Britain, so you never know; one day we might graduate from secondary school as well.

Incidentally, we don;t usually use the terms 'high school' or 'college' as a generic name for secondary school, although they are often included in a school's name - 'The Royal High School, Edinburgh', 'Eton College'. When I was a student, we used 'college' as generic word for tertiary level institutions - you didn't have to worry about distinguishing between university, poly (polytechnic) or further education college for example - but they're virtually all universities nowadays, anyway. Nowadays it's often just 'uni'.