Wednesday, February 11, 2009

How GHOTI Equals FISH


Remember the post about Webster trying to get phonetic in spelling, such as 'booty' for beauty?

He did get lots of 'ph' made into 'f' - phantasy became fantasy, etc..
He tried all this in his first dictionary and most like booty got rejected!
He wanted stuff spelled like it sounded to avoid all the confusion

Here's a great example of English messing with students!

take these sounds:
GH as in ROUGH is "F"
O as I sound in WOMEN = "I"
TI for 'sh' sound as in ACTION = "SH"

so GHOTI == FISH !! - from Gallagher's "The Accountant" as in 'there's no accounting for the english language!'

later .. 'Oh,say'

1 comment:

Harri Rautiainen said...

I guess GHOTI is credited to Sir G. Bernard Shaw.