Pronounce the following word: Ghoti. Back in the 1970s, when I taught English in Korea, I used to start each term by writing this word on a chart and challenging my students to pronounce it. It might surprise you to know that no one, absolutely no one, ever got it right. It’s not, as you might be thinking, ‘Gotty,’ or ‘Goaty.’ The pronunciation I was looking for here was ‘Fish.’
Okay, pick your chins up off the floor, and let me explain. I used this old exercise that I learned many years ago to illustrate to my students just how irregular the English language can be, and to stress upon them the need to be flexible as they approached learning it. Why, you might ask – or how does ghoti spell fish? Permettez-moi to explain.
‘Gh’ is pronounced like the ‘gh’ in enough, or ‘f.’ ‘O’ is pronounced like the ‘o’ in the word women, and ‘ti’ is the ‘ti’ in the word nation, ergo ‘fish.’ Get it? Unlike many languages, the spelling of words in English does not follow a fixed pattern. Each word’s spelling and pronunciation must be learned individually.
I’ve studied several languages other than English, and for a long time I believed – because I’d been told – that languages like Chinese, Japanese and Russian were the world’s most difficult. I should have been suspicious since none of the people telling me this were Chinese, Japanese or Russian.
When I went to Korea in 1973, after my last army tour in Vietnam, I began teaching English at night at one of Korea’s cosmetics companies. Preparing my lesson plans, I had a startling revelation; of all the languages I’d been exposed to, English was the most nonstandard and illogical. Spelling rules have more exceptions than cowards got draft deferments, and pronunciation is so hit or miss you have a 50 percent chance of saying a word wrong.
There is no rhyme or reason for this, other perhaps than the fact that English has so many words borrowed from other languages. English is like a hoarder’s closet; it has some of everything.
We have some of just about everything. From French we get café, and restaurant, from Italian we get macaroni and cappuccino, and we get okra and gumbo from some African dialect. And, that’s just in the food and drink category.
And, you don’t want to get me started on spelling and pronunciation. Take this sentence, for example: I went through enough books, though, I sat against the bough of the tree to read one that I bought at the store. In every one of these words the ‘ough’ letter combination is pronounced differently.
Why do so many English words have a silent ‘e’ at the end—‘have’ being one exception? Why are some words spelled with ‘sion’ and others with ‘tion’ but both are pronounced the same way? Here are some other ‘things that drive you crazy about English. So, a will sew a silk purse from the sow’s ear. So and sew are pronounced the same, but so for sow unless you plan to sow some seeds, in which case it joins so and sew.
Are you totally confused now? Don’t be. Millions of kids learn this darn language and get by just fine. True, in the United States we have a problem with some people who can’t read well, and, as I can attest from running a writing workshop every summer, even more who can’t write their way out of a paper bag, but people manage.
So, I’m not trashing English, but I do want to set the record straight. You’ll get a lot of English speakers who get very defensive when you say that English lacks logic. Hey, it is what it is, so get over it. We have the zaniest language I know of, except maybe languages like Khosa with those tongue clicks which I have never been able to master.
But that’s another subject I’d rather not bother with at the moment. – NWI
