English is such a tricky language to pronounce if you only have the written word to go by. Often not only are the letters in the words unhelpful in arriving at a pronunciation, but the same letters in the same combination are pronounced differently. I mean, there’s bough that rhymes with cow, rough that rhymes with bluff and cough that rhymes with sloth.

I’m talking about ‘standard’ English here. The pronunciation of those words will slide into each other as you cross the UK or indeed the English-speaking world.

Spelling has not evolved to keep pace with our changing pronunciation. The day the word ‘night’ was set in stone, the word must have sounded closer to the German ‘nacht’ than the modern pronunciation. Scottish poet Robert Burns’ ‘braw bricht moonlicht nicht’ gives a flavour of Scottish some 200 years ago … not so far away linguistically from how we could imagine ‘night’ to have been pronounced.

As well as words that look the same and are pronounced differently, we have words that are spelt differently but are pronounced identically. Take ‘meet’ and ‘meat’ for instance. Once, they would have sounded different, with meet sounding like ‘meht’, meat like ‘maiht’ and, incidentally, mate like ‘maht’.

This is all part of what is known as ‘the great vowel shift’, which affected our pronunciation of vowels in the Middle Ages. However, it did not spread uniformly across the British Isles. I have been offered a cup of ‘taiyh’ in Birmingham rather than tea. In Ireland the shift did not happen at the same pace as England, which explains why two similarly named poets are pronounced quite differently, the English Keates (keets) and the Irish Yeates (yayhts).

Also in English, there are spellings that have been ‘retrofitted’ for sense, such as forehead. It used to be pronounced ‘forrid’ to rhyme with ‘horrid’ (as per the little girl in the poem) but it is now just as often pronounced as it is written. The same can now be said of often, where the t is often pronounced.

The age of mass media and sound recording has now allowed us to notice the subtle changes in pronunciation as the river of language rushes through time. Already the plucky cockney of the second world war newsreel and his plummy interviewer sound archaic. Even the Queen, according to vocal studies I heard thanks to the Open University, has subtly altered her pronunciation over her time as head of state, now being ‘happee’ (happy) rather than ‘haipai’.

Apart from the waxing and waning of local dialects and accents, with multicultural London English on the up and regional words declining, the noticeable changes in pronunciation, grammar and syntax come mainly from our American cousins via film and TV.

Where we older folk might have said ‘Let’s go and see a film’ the youth now ‘go see’ it. When we might have already done something, the young people already did it, and my personal favourite over/under 40s test, I might ask if I can have a cup of coffee in a cafe, whereas the youth will ask to get a coffee. It is strange to see the forgotten ‘gotten’ returning from America, along with the ancient festival of Halloween, which apart from a bit of apple-bobbing, had almost died out in the UK. Now we have gotten our pumpkins, we trick or treat with the best of them.