Ghoti and Fish

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NICEGUY
Guest

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 12:58 pm Post subject: Ghoti and Fish

HI all, I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound like fish? How is it possible? Niceguy

Alan OBrien
Guest

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:23 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

"NICEGUY" <4178875@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1128668320.899418.302170@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

Quote:

HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

This is an oldie:

It is the -gh from, say, enough (f).
The -o- from women (i)
The -ti- from, say, action (sh).

Martin Ambuhl
Guest

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:37 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

NICEGUY wrote:

Quote:

HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that 'fish' could be
spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of the criticism of the
"irrationality" of English spelling. It is based on assigning phonetic
values to letters that they *never* have in the places they occur in
'ghoti.' It is specious, and should be ignored.

Mike Lyle
Guest

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 4:46 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

Martin Ambuhl wrote:

Quote:

NICEGUY wrote:
HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti"
sound like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that 'fish'
could
be spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of the criticism of the
"irrationality" of English spelling. It is based on assigning
phonetic values to letters that they *never* have in the places
they
occur in 'ghoti.' It is specious, and should be ignored.

Or, more kindly, it's a nice little joke we play with our children
and selected foreign students, and perfectly harmless.

However old the gag, somebody's always hearing it for the first time.

--
Mike
"No, she went of her own accord."

Sericinus hunter
Guest

Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 9:21 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

NICEGUY wrote:

Quote:

HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

Pavel314
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 4:26 am Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

"Martin Ambuhl" <mambuhl@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:otq1f.10705$QE1.203@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...

Quote:

NICEGUY wrote:
HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that 'fish' could be
spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of the criticism of the
"irrationality" of English spelling. It is based on assigning phonetic
values to letters that they *never* have in the places they occur in
'ghoti.' It is specious, and should be ignored.

Oh, beautiful for specious skies....

Iain
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 5:42 am Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

NICEGUY wrote:

Quote:

HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

Niceguy

That attacks a strawman. Standard English is spelled
annoduodeviginticentenaromagnalondinomorphophonemically, and sounds
neo-Elizabethan, but to the modern ear would still be "just another
dialect".

~Iain

Bob Cunningham
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 7:00 am Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:26:27 -0400, "Pavel314"
<Pavel314@NOSPAM.comcast.net> said:

Quote:

"Martin Ambuhl" <mambuhl@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:otq1f.10705$QE1.203@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
NICEGUY wrote:
HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that 'fish' could be
spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of the criticism of the
"irrationality" of English spelling. It is based on assigning phonetic
values to letters that they *never* have in the places they occur in
'ghoti.' It is specious, and should be ignored.

On the contrary, it should be admired as an ingenious
illustration of the absurdity of English spelling. The
tired old argument that the collocations in "ghoti" don't
occur in those positions in ordinary English words is not
persuasive. The sound [f] is spelled "gh" in English words,
so there's no reason to assume it could not be used that way
in a word that has not yet been coined. Same with "o"
pronounced [I] and "ti" pronounced [S].

Would M.A. argue that "beautiful" just missed being an
impossible spelling because there are no other English
words, except for other derivatives of "beauty", in which
"eau" is pronounced [ju:]?

Quote:

Oh, beautiful for specious skies....

Four umber weaves of groin.

Raymond S. Wise
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 2:54 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

Bob Cunningham wrote:

Quote:

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:26:27 -0400, "Pavel314"
Pavel314@NOSPAM.comcast.net> said:

"Martin Ambuhl" <mambuhl@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:otq1f.10705$QE1.203@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
NICEGUY wrote:
HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that 'fish' could be
spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of the criticism of the
"irrationality" of English spelling. It is based on assigning phonetic
values to letters that they *never* have in the places they occur in
'ghoti.' It is specious, and should be ignored.

On the contrary, it should be admired as an ingenious
illustration of the absurdity of English spelling. The
tired old argument that the collocations in "ghoti" don't
occur in those positions in ordinary English words is not
persuasive. The sound [f] is spelled "gh" in English words,
so there's no reason to assume it could not be used that way
in a word that has not yet been coined. Same with "o"
pronounced [I] and "ti" pronounced [S].

Would M.A. argue that "beautiful" just missed being an
impossible spelling because there are no other English
words, except for other derivatives of "beauty", in which
"eau" is pronounced [ju:]?

What's a tired argument to you was a novel argument to me when I
encountered it just a few years ago. A foreigner learning English may
be confident that a word beginning with "gh" is *not* pronounced [f],
even though those letters may be pronounced that way at the end of some
words.

"Beauty" and its derivatives may be considered an exception or a very
narrowly applied rule. Here's another exception: It occurred to me
recently, while watching *Family Guy,* that "quahog," a clam after
which is named the fictional city of Quahog, Rhode Island in the
program, is the only English word I can think of in which "a" by itself
(rather than in combinations such as "au" or "eau") is pronounced like
"oh."

--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA

E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

Iain
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:03 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

Bob Cunningham wrote:

Quote:

English spelling is not absurd. You are making two false assumptions:

1) That it is supposed to denote modern\mainstream pronunciation.
2) That it is supposed to be fully phonetic\phonemic

Readers don't care exactly how a person says "Re-", only that they are
saying that particular morpheme.

If you were to read modern English using Elizabethan text-to-speech
rules, it would come out as no different from modern English than
various modern Englishs are from one another: easier to understand than
Burns, the second most famous English language poet ever.

Quote:

The
tired old argument that the collocations in "ghoti" don't
occur in those positions in ordinary English words is not
persuasive. The sound [f] is spelled "gh" in English words,

GH does not exist to spell a modern sound, except in Scotland.

Quote:

so there's no reason to assume it could not be used that way
in a word that has not yet been coined. Same with "o"
pronounced [I] and "ti" pronounced [S].

In Wales they sometimes say "Quest-yon". The soft sound of "TI" arises
from I being consonantal. So "Tune"("Tyoon") can be safely distilled as
"Choon"(although I recognise it's not same sound).

Quote:

Would M.A. argue that "beautiful" just missed being an
impossible spelling because there are no other English
words, except for other derivatives of "beauty", in which
"eau" is pronounced [ju:]?

"EE AY YOO tiful"

~Iain

Iain
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:11 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

Raymond S. Wise wrote:

Quote:

Bob Cunningham wrote:
On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:26:27 -0400, "Pavel314"
Pavel314@NOSPAM.comcast.net> said:

"Martin Ambuhl" <mambuhl@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:otq1f.10705$QE1.203@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
NICEGUY wrote:
HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that 'fish' could be
spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of the criticism of the
"irrationality" of English spelling. It is based on assigning phonetic
values to letters that they *never* have in the places they occur in
'ghoti.' It is specious, and should be ignored.

On the contrary, it should be admired as an ingenious
illustration of the absurdity of English spelling. The
tired old argument that the collocations in "ghoti" don't
occur in those positions in ordinary English words is not
persuasive. The sound [f] is spelled "gh" in English words,
so there's no reason to assume it could not be used that way
in a word that has not yet been coined. Same with "o"
pronounced [I] and "ti" pronounced [S].

Would M.A. argue that "beautiful" just missed being an
impossible spelling because there are no other English
words, except for other derivatives of "beauty", in which
"eau" is pronounced [ju:]?

What's a tired argument to you was a novel argument to me when I
encountered it just a few years ago. A foreigner learning English may
be confident that a word beginning with "gh" is *not* pronounced [f],
even though those letters may be pronounced that way at the end of some
words.

"Beauty" and its derivatives may be considered an exception or a very
narrowly applied rule. Here's another exception: It occurred to me
recently, while watching *Family Guy,* that "quahog," a clam after
which is named the fictional city of Quahog, Rhode Island in the
program, is the only English word I can think of in which "a" by itself
(rather than in combinations such as "au" or "eau") is pronounced like
"oh."

Are you sure it's not the Focker effect?

~Iain

Bob Cunningham
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 8:05 pm Post subject: "Ghoti" and "fish" [was: Re: Ghoti and Fish]

On 8 Oct 2005 01:54:20 -0700, "Raymond S. Wise"
<mplsray@my-deja.com> said:

Quote:

A foreigner learning English would be well-advised to not
make any assumption at all about how a given English word is
pronounced based on its spelling.

Quote:

"Beauty" and its derivatives may be considered an exception or a very
narrowly applied rule.

So why can't the [f] in "ghoti" be considered an exception
or a narrow, unique application of a rule? You can't have
your cake and eat it, too.

Anyway, I doubt that the clever person who came up with the
spelling "ghoti" for "fish" meant that "fish" could
actually be spelled that way. His cleverness lay in showing
in an amusing, concise way that English sounds can have a
number of different spellings. That "gh" doesn't normally
appear with the pronunciation [f] at the beginning of a word
is beside the point.

Another absurdity of English spelling is that one spelling
may have a wide variety of different pronunciations.

I think I've mentioned in alt.usage.english a few times over
the years that in one of my Russian classes there was a man
who was a native of an Eastern European country. He told me
that of all the languages he had learned, English was by far
the easiest. I said, "But how about the crazy spelling?"
His answer: "Americans can't spell, either".

[...]

Django Cat
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 9:52 pm Post subject: Re: Ghoti and Fish

NICEGUY wrote:

Quote:

HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can "ghoti" sound
like fish? How is it possible?

Niceguy

It was George Bernard Shaw's demonstration of the lack of logic or
phonetic information in the English spelling system, but it's often
been pointed out that it doesn't work because no words *start* gh and
sound /f/.

DC

Django Cat
Guest

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 9:54 pm Post subject: Re: "Ghoti" and "fish" [was: Re: Ghoti and Fish]

Bob Cunningham wrote:

Quote:

On 8 Oct 2005 01:54:20 -0700, "Raymond S. Wise"
mplsray@my-deja.com> said:

Bob Cunningham wrote:
On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:26:27 -0400, "Pavel314"
Pavel314@NOSPAM.comcast.net> said:

"Martin Ambuhl" <mambuhl@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:otq1f.10705$QE1.203@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
NICEGUY wrote:
HI all,

I heard that ghoti and fish have same pronunciation. Can
"ghoti" sound >> like fish? How is it possible?

'ghoti' can never be pronounced 'fish'. The claim that
'fish' could be spelt 'ghoti' is a longer-standing part of
the criticism of the "irrationality" of English spelling. It
is based on assigning phonetic values to letters that they
never have in the places they occur in 'ghoti.' It is
specious, and should be ignored.

On the contrary, it should be admired as an ingenious
illustration of the absurdity of English spelling. The
tired old argument that the collocations in "ghoti" don't
occur in those positions in ordinary English words is not
persuasive. The sound [f] is spelled "gh" in English words,
so there's no reason to assume it could not be used that way
in a word that has not yet been coined. Same with "o"
pronounced [I] and "ti" pronounced [S].

Would M.A. argue that "beautiful" just missed being an
impossible spelling because there are no other English
words, except for other derivatives of "beauty", in which
"eau" is pronounced [ju:]?

What's a tired argument to you was a novel argument to me when I
encountered it just a few years ago. A foreigner learning English
may be confident that a word beginning with "gh" is not pronounced
[f], even though those letters may be pronounced that way at the
end of some words.

A foreigner learning English would be well-advised to not
make any assumption at all about how a given English word is
pronounced based on its spelling.

"Beauty" and its derivatives may be considered an exception or a
very narrowly applied rule.

So why can't the [f] in "ghoti" be considered an exception
or a narrow, unique application of a rule? You can't have
your cake and eat it, too.

Anyway, I doubt that the clever person who came up with the
spelling "ghoti" for "fish" meant that "fish" could
actually be spelled that way. His cleverness lay in showing
in an amusing, concise way that English sounds can have a
number of different spellings.

GBS, or to put it another way, a well-known smartarse.

DC

Bob Cunningham
Guest

Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 1:00 am Post subject: Re: "Ghoti" and "fish" [was: Re: Ghoti and Fish]

On Sat, 08 Oct 2005 10:54:31 -0500, "Django Cat"
<nospam@please> said:

Quote:

Bob Cunningham wrote:

[...]

Quote:

Anyway, I doubt that the clever person who came up with the
spelling "ghoti" for "fish" meant that "fish" could
actually be spelled that way. His cleverness lay in showing
in an amusing, concise way that English sounds can have a
number of different spellings.

GBS, or to put it another way, a well-known smartarse.

I don't know who the person was who devised "ghoti", but
it's pretty well established that it wasn't George Bernard
Shaw. In fact, as I remember, GBS disapproved of it because
he thought it would cast his phonetic-spelling movement in a
bad light.

Smatter a fact, see
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxwhat04.html .

Quote:

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