Gerard Nolst Trenité

Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité was a Dutch observer of English.

Nolst Trenité published under the pseudonym Charivarius (which he pronounced irregularly as [ʃariˈvariəs]). While the pronunciation of his own surname is not obvious (possibly the original French [tʁɛniˈte]), he is best known in the English-speaking world for his poem The Chaos which demonstrates many of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and first appeared as an appendix to his 1920 textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen. The subtitle of the book means "English pronunciation exercises", but uses the pre-1947 Dutch spelling instead of current engelse.