15 ms·

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee. There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation. [1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.

degun 1y ago
The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.
- mousethatroared 1y ago
  But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner. But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.
  - hyperpape 1y ago
    > But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.
    - jgwil2 1y ago
      Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Probably not. Toddlers generally don't have the brain to learn any reading. Spanish's advantages in reading isn't how young you can start learning to read, it is how fast you can stop reading. Spanish schools stop teaching reading takes about 5 years to learn, English 6, and Japanese 9 - after that much training kids are finally considered to read anything. (sometimes we talk about college level reading, but that is more about mastery of topic specific topic - Doctors, lawyers, and engineers each have special vocabulary that needs extra training to read, but they cannot read each other's technical papers)
      - mousethatroared 1y ago
        I learned how to read in six months. My kid took two and half years. The Chinese take 10 years. So what? Are the Chinese terribly educated?
  - akst 1y ago
    English Orthography doesn't exactly serve native speakers either.
    - devilbunny 1y ago
      It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.
        mousethatroared 1y ago
        Im a materials scientist and I use etymology every day. Knowing etymology is a an easy way to memorize things.
        devilbunny 1y ago
        If you’re seeing a word for the first time, it is pretty useful - partly with pronunciation but definitely with meaning. You do have to have some familiarity with the source languages, but if it’s an unfamiliar but nativized word, those are almost always ultimately Latin or Greek.
        int_19h 1y ago
        If you're seeing the word for the first time and need to figure out how to pronounce it, how would you know that “y” is acting as a vowel and not as a consonant in the first place?
papichulo2023 1y ago
As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?
- gatlin 1y ago
  come to texas and experience a whole universe of dipthongs (one of which remedies this)
- jojobas 1y ago
  It's not, unless you're a yankee. They're going to hear you're a foreigner anyway, might as well speak Queen's English.
- Tagbert 1y ago
  ‘W’ started out as a long ‘U’ so it’s not unreasonable
  - int_19h 1y ago
    It was spelled as a double U originally (hence the name), but that doesn't mean that it was pronounced as a long U! It was always an approximant.
- antod 1y ago
  That's just one accent. Most accents pronounce that W (especially outside the US).
- simondotau 1y ago
  If you think that’s crazy, consider that “English” is the only word in the English language that spells the /ɪŋ/ (‘ing’) sound as “eng”.
  - o11c 1y ago
    Eh, not really. "engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are all fairly common words that are either often or exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /ŋ/ before g or k, even if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word. Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing" or "eng" finds a few more but nothing super interesting (though a few are in the middle of a word). Obviously words where "g" is pronounced /dʒ/ (like "j" for those who can't read IPA) aren't subject to this.
germandiago 1y ago
As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it. Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.
- woleium 1y ago
  as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.
  - devman0 1y ago
    Blame the Normans for that one...well English was already kind of a mess, but the the conquest of England by the Normans really sealed the deal.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'. Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near the worst offender of copulating with other languages for features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.
    - kleiba 1y ago
      Let's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.
    - grey413 1y ago
      As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology. The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.
wredcoll 1y ago
I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does. Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!
- jcranmer 1y ago
  A few plausible answers to that: In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration effort. In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from 500-year old Portuguese.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    > That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet Not just European languages. Pinyin is useful for everyone that has to interact with Chinese words, whether their first language is English, French, Swahili, or even Mandarin. A lot of people might not realize that the primary users of Pinyin are Chinese people. The way typing Chinese works is that you type the pronunciation in Pinyin and then a box pops up with choices of characters from which you select the correct one. It's also used in dictionaries to give the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters.
- paulmooreparks 1y ago
  It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
  - recursivecaveat 1y ago
yeasku 1y ago
English is not a phonetic language and it also lacks accents. Saying it has pronunciartion rules it is an strech. You have conventions. In languages like spanish if you read a word, is very hard to misspronounce it.
- throaway955 1y ago
  no, for the millionth time, English has rules, NOT conventions, you just need to know the historical context behind the multiple rules.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.) Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"? (The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)
jjav 1y ago
> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all. There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much. But, french is much worse!
- watwut 1y ago
  > But, french is much worse! Nah. Having learned both, French is easier in this regard. It is not as random, it has rules they work most of the time.
  - gottorf 1y ago
    French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee harder.
    - ralferoo 1y ago
      French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.
      - cm2187 1y ago
        An even worse example is the last name "de Broglie", which I think most French natives would likely get wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg
        1y ago
goalieca 1y ago
English is a particularly challenging language to spell with. How many languages have a national spelling competition?
taeric 1y ago
It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea. Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  At least one really obvious way to know that English is a phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made up names in their books. Sure, sometimes there are disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but generally readers come up with quite similar pronunciations.
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    The confusion may come from the various spelling conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay". The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.
    - dinfinity 1y ago
      Eh. Only sometimes. Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing. English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.
coffeeling 1y ago
Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
You're correct on the reasons why "ghoti" cannot be pronounced like "fish," but what your explanation illustrates is that the mapping from English spelling to pronunciation is extremely nuanced - needlessly so. A more direct phonetic writing system, like many other languages have, would make it much easier to learn how to read and write English.
zahlman 1y ago
> Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?
- tanjtanjtanj 1y ago
  It depends on your accent, within a couple steps of me I can find someone that pronounces it “Wimmen”, “Wuhmen”, or “Woemen”.

degun 1y ago

The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.

mousethatroared 1y ago
But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner. But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.
- hyperpape 1y ago
  > But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.
  - jgwil2 1y ago
    Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Probably not. Toddlers generally don't have the brain to learn any reading. Spanish's advantages in reading isn't how young you can start learning to read, it is how fast you can stop reading. Spanish schools stop teaching reading takes about 5 years to learn, English 6, and Japanese 9 - after that much training kids are finally considered to read anything. (sometimes we talk about college level reading, but that is more about mastery of topic specific topic - Doctors, lawyers, and engineers each have special vocabulary that needs extra training to read, but they cannot read each other's technical papers)
    - mousethatroared 1y ago
      I learned how to read in six months. My kid took two and half years. The Chinese take 10 years. So what? Are the Chinese terribly educated?
- akst 1y ago
  English Orthography doesn't exactly serve native speakers either.
  - devilbunny 1y ago
    It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.
      - mousethatroared 1y ago
        Im a materials scientist and I use etymology every day. Knowing etymology is a an easy way to memorize things.
      - devilbunny 1y ago
        If you’re seeing a word for the first time, it is pretty useful - partly with pronunciation but definitely with meaning. You do have to have some familiarity with the source languages, but if it’s an unfamiliar but nativized word, those are almost always ultimately Latin or Greek.
        int_19h 1y ago
        If you're seeing the word for the first time and need to figure out how to pronounce it, how would you know that “y” is acting as a vowel and not as a consonant in the first place?

papichulo2023 1y ago

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

gatlin 1y ago
come to texas and experience a whole universe of dipthongs (one of which remedies this)
jojobas 1y ago
It's not, unless you're a yankee. They're going to hear you're a foreigner anyway, might as well speak Queen's English.
Tagbert 1y ago
‘W’ started out as a long ‘U’ so it’s not unreasonable
- int_19h 1y ago
  It was spelled as a double U originally (hence the name), but that doesn't mean that it was pronounced as a long U! It was always an approximant.
antod 1y ago
That's just one accent. Most accents pronounce that W (especially outside the US).
simondotau 1y ago
If you think that’s crazy, consider that “English” is the only word in the English language that spells the /ɪŋ/ (‘ing’) sound as “eng”.
- o11c 1y ago
  Eh, not really. "engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are all fairly common words that are either often or exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /ŋ/ before g or k, even if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word. Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing" or "eng" finds a few more but nothing super interesting (though a few are in the middle of a word). Obviously words where "g" is pronounced /dʒ/ (like "j" for those who can't read IPA) aren't subject to this.

germandiago 1y ago

As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it. Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.

woleium 1y ago
as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.
- devman0 1y ago
  Blame the Normans for that one...well English was already kind of a mess, but the the conquest of England by the Normans really sealed the deal.
- jcranmer 1y ago
  This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'. Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near the worst offender of copulating with other languages for features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.
  - kleiba 1y ago
    Let's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.
  - grey413 1y ago
    As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology. The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.

wredcoll 1y ago

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does. Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

jcranmer 1y ago
A few plausible answers to that: In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration effort. In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from 500-year old Portuguese.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet Not just European languages. Pinyin is useful for everyone that has to interact with Chinese words, whether their first language is English, French, Swahili, or even Mandarin. A lot of people might not realize that the primary users of Pinyin are Chinese people. The way typing Chinese works is that you type the pronunciation in Pinyin and then a box pops up with choices of characters from which you select the correct one. It's also used in dictionaries to give the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters.
paulmooreparks 1y ago
It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
- recursivecaveat 1y ago

yeasku 1y ago

English is not a phonetic language and it also lacks accents. Saying it has pronunciartion rules it is an strech. You have conventions. In languages like spanish if you read a word, is very hard to misspronounce it.

throaway955 1y ago
no, for the millionth time, English has rules, NOT conventions, you just need to know the historical context behind the multiple rules.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.) Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"? (The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)

jjav 1y ago

> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all. There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much. But, french is much worse!

watwut 1y ago
> But, french is much worse! Nah. Having learned both, French is easier in this regard. It is not as random, it has rules they work most of the time.
- gottorf 1y ago
  French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee harder.
  - ralferoo 1y ago
    French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.
    - cm2187 1y ago
      An even worse example is the last name "de Broglie", which I think most French natives would likely get wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg
      - 1y ago

goalieca 1y ago

English is a particularly challenging language to spell with. How many languages have a national spelling competition?

taeric 1y ago

It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea. Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
At least one really obvious way to know that English is a phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made up names in their books. Sure, sometimes there are disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but generally readers come up with quite similar pronunciations.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  The confusion may come from the various spelling conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay". The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.
  - dinfinity 1y ago
    Eh. Only sometimes. Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing. English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.

coffeeling 1y ago

Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

DiogenesKynikos 1y ago

You're correct on the reasons why "ghoti" cannot be pronounced like "fish," but what your explanation illustrates is that the mapping from English spelling to pronunciation is extremely nuanced - needlessly so. A more direct phonetic writing system, like many other languages have, would make it much easier to learn how to read and write English.

zahlman 1y ago

> Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?

tanjtanjtanj 1y ago
It depends on your accent, within a couple steps of me I can find someone that pronounces it “Wimmen”, “Wuhmen”, or “Woemen”.