856
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
856 points (98.3% liked)
Funny
6720 readers
4 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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".