If you want a consonsant-light language you need to look at Romance languages like Spanish and Italian. Everyday English is closer to the Germanic languages, which are characterised by bundles of consonants between the vowels.

That's why many singers love singing in Italian - they don't have to worry about tripping over clusters of consonants. To my ears, many opera singers ignore most of the consonants in whatever language they're singing, in order to be able to make a beautiful sound on the vowels. In folk singing, we know better, and don't want to lose the meaning, so we try to keep the pronunciation close to speech.

Even in speech, most speakers do smooth out the bumps somewhat. For example, most people don't pronounce all the letters in "first step" but say something like "firs tep". The same thing tends to happen in singing, although you often have more time to spend on a syllable and can thus get all the sounds in more easily than you could in speech.

I don't see how English could be permanently changed in a consistent way to avoid this, but good lyricists (and Anon is often a good lyricist) can usually manage to avoid too many clumsy logjams of letters. The example above, "smite death's threatening wave" is needlessly messy. And what does it mean anyway? Does it mean that death is like a wave on the sea, or that death is waving to you in a threatening way? In either case, can one smite a wave? There's no excuse for bad, ugly writing like that, either in hymnals or anywhere else.

I sympathise with people whose first language is one that is very different from English, but English has evolved this way for good reasons and we can't change it now. What song writers can do is to write singable words, avoiding clumsy mouthfuls of consonants, and as leenia says, folk singers can tweak any awkward words to make them more singable. (There's an ugly phrase - "awkward words". Don't put that in a song!)

Marje