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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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My father used to tell me that ghoti was pronounced "fish."
GH as in rough,
O as in women,
TI as in ration.
Yup. That's a pretty common one to explain the whimsy of the English language
That's not how any of that works.
It is phonetically how it works.
No it isn't. The letters "gh" doesn't make the "f" sound without the full "ough", you can't just take some of the letters out. Same with the "ti" in "tion". In addition, words trace their pronunciation from their origin. Words ending in "tion" are latin-derived, and shares an origion with "sion" (Mission, passion) and cion (suspicion). The reason that "ough" sometimes has an "f" sound is that originally it had a glottal stop, like the word "loch" in Scottish, but over time that glottal stop slipped and became an "f".
The point is, while certain letter sequences have surprising pronunciations in English, you can't just take those weird pronunciations out of context and create a new word. And you certainly can't say that "ghoti" is pronounced "fish".