Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not supposed to be believable - quite the opposite. The entire point is that it's an artifical example to demonstrate irregularities.
Was there such a point? The person who invented this spelling was 21 years old, if I'm reading the article correctly. Who knows, maybe the entire point of inventing it was to impress opposite sex.
Ghoti
161–170 of 248 posts
Re: Ghoti
#162If this irritates anyone, you might be interested in the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Read to reform English spelling. They proposed a consistent, phonetic, spelling and writing system called Shavian and published a now-rare book using that system. The second iteration made some slight usability and efficiency improvements and called the new work Quikscript. Of course, in an alternate universe, this super…
> reform English spelling You forgot about this one: http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html .
Re: Ghoti
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Riiiiight, so obviously you personally have no problems with the spelling rules of English (which do, in general, exist, contrary to popular belief). But, we need to ask ourselves: if it is at all conceivable that "ghoti" could be sounded out as "fish", just what the fuck is going on here? Sure, you don't have a problem dealing with this nonsense - I don't have one neither! But I struggle to believe that you've faile…
(maybe I do not understand the definition of "conceivable") I think it is totally inconceivable that someone would read this word as "fish"! It would require extreme amount of mind-bending! Maybe this is why I am so angry with this article. They could have picked less artificial example to demonstrate irregularities.
What should we infer from this? To one way of thinking, the "-ough" suffix is "uff"... well, mostly... and this says nothing about (say) "gh" as a prefix, which has its own rules. But to another, clearly "gh" can sometimes be pronounced "f"; and, since we have "tough" and "bough", by extension we can assume nothing from (say) "ghost".
Either way, whatever you think of "ghoti", "bough" vs "tough" is (in my view) enough to demonstrate that the current state of affairs is what you might well spell "er kluctureghoucc".
Re: Ghoti
#164Re: Ghoti
#165I think this example is far-fetched and, due to being so far-fetched, is useless. I mean there are no actual english words where "gh" at the beginning of a word would be pronounced as "f", right? And "gh" at the end of a word hints heavily that you should pronounce it as "f", there are no irregularities here.
Riiiiight, so obviously you personally have no problems with the spelling rules of English (which do, in general, exist, contrary to popular belief). But, we need to ask ourselves: if it is at all conceivable that "ghoti" could be sounded out as "fish", just what the fuck is going on here? Sure, you don't have a problem dealing with this nonsense - I don't have one neither! But I struggle to believe that you've faile…
Here's the thing: spelling rules are context-sensitive, and if you actually understand the underlying sound rules, spelling in English is often not that bad. For example, there is a fricatization process for /t/ and /s/ sounds convert to a /ʃ/ or a /ʒ/--this is how "-tion" is pronounced /ʃən/. Or the tendency of multiple consonants in a cluster to all be voiced or unvoiced (hence why dogs is pronounced /dogz/ and not /dogs/). Even consider the velarization of "n" in the "-ing" suffix, which is pronunced /ŋg/ and not /ng/ (try actually pronouncing /ng/! It's not easy).
I'm not aware of any spelling reforms that would propose to fix the last two examples I give, but the fricatization changes is often one of most common ones people suggest changing. That's a sign that people are willing to tolerate some degree of phonetic inaccuracies.
The real issue with English is our tendency to adopt foreign words with foreign pronunciations, foreign spellings, and sometimes even foreign morphology. And sometimes we even botch that--witness words like "gyro" or "ginkgo". This means that trying to pronounce unusual words often means first guessing what language the words (or even morphemes!) comes from, and then internalizing some bastardized form of that foreign language's phonology.
Re: Ghoti
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
American English speakers can have trouble understanding British English speakers too, fwiw. Mostly due to some dramatically different slang and pronunciation rather than use of more obscure words though.
I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation. Another funny one I ran into a f…
Re: Ghoti
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in Australia, so would have considered myself a native English speaker. We’re even a British colony! I moved to Scotland for a year, and London for a few years later. I’d regularly here phrasing I’d never heard before and would need the speaker to clarify or would look up later. In the vast majority of those cases it was most often an old word that appears to have fallen out of fashionable usage. “Ken” bein…
Scots is not technically the same as English - they diverged about 900 years ago, and differences like ken are common (compare to French connaître, or German kennen).
Re: Ghoti
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in California for a while and something that kept throwing people off was that I pronounce my "t"s in the English way rather than drop them to "d"s. So it's buTTer and not 'budder', thirTy not 'thirdy', etc. Once I started dropping them to "d"s too, things improved significantly, and I can see why a lot of British YouTubers and geeks develop this 'trans-Atlantic' affectation. Another funny one I ran into a f…
Half eight in Swedish is 7:30 :-)
Re: Ghoti
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?" That’s likely because the languages you speak all share recent ancestry (if they’re not all Romance languages, they’re at least all descended from Proto-Indo-European.) Meanwhile, I’ve seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have very bad mutual intelligibility, because they make…
Spot on. I've witnessed Chinese and Indians (all with decent English skills) be unable to conduct business meetings due to difficult understanding each other's accents. On that project, I frequently 'translated' from English to English, with little/no change in word choice or sentence structure.