3 ms·

Related https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

• jcranmer 7y ago
  But English pronunciation rules are regular enough to be able to say that "ghoti" should be pronounced "GO-tee". Word-initial "gh" is always pronounced as a hard g. The argument that "o" can be pronounced /ı/ comes from a vowel reduction rule in unstressed syllables. And pronouncing "ti" as /ʃ/ comes from the yod-coalescence that fricatizes /t/, /d/, /z/, and /s/ in certain cases, namely where the previous syllable ends in one of those consonants and the next one begins with a /j/ ("y") sound. Since "ti" is word final here, there's nothing to fricatize it. English spelling does have quite a few rules, and it follows them far more than people realize. The main real problem is our proclivity to borrow foreign words and insist on using foreign spelling and pronunciation for them. The other main issue is that we conserved the spelling of English from Middle English, so you have to map the pronunciation shifts to spelling rules--and some words ended up being weird exceptions to the pronunciation shifts (e.g., "father" went in a different direction from the other "-ather" words, like "lather" and "rather").
  • kwhitefoot 7y ago
    >(e.g., "father" went in a different direction from the other "-ather" words, like "lather" and "rather"). In my dialect (north eastern corner of the West Country) all three sound the same except for the initial. Otherwise I agree with everything you said.