GHOTI

                               

You know ghoti, don’t you? It’s pronounced ‘fish’ – yes, that’s right:

   Gh as the gh in cough – that would be your f

   O and the o in women – that would be your I or ih

   Ti as the ti in fascination – there’s the sh

Fascination – yes, it’s fascinating to me how words are spelled and pronounced so differently, sometimes so illogically.

In England, Worcestershire is pronounced as Woos-ter-shire or sheer.

Here we pronounce Westchester as Westchester, why don’t we pronounce it as Wester – leaving out the chest. Well, I fully realize that there are precedents for this, but I love to mess with words. The British must always have been in a hurry. They seem to have shortened whatever words they could. Featherstonehaugh is pronounces Fee-ston-hue, Cholmondeley is pronounced Chumley – one syllable less. Dalziel is pronounced Dee-ell. Were they always in a hurry to pronounce the names and get them over and done with?

While I’m rambling on about words, my favorite questionable words are names from China. I know that a according to my favorite Wikipedia:

“Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan.” 

But when they were “romanizing” the words, why didn’t they pay attention to the spelling vs the pronunciations. Most readers and speakers of the Roman-based languages would, at first glance, know how to pronounce my favorite Feng Shui. They’d pronounce it as it looks: feng schwee or shooey. But no, it is pronounced fung shway.  So why didn’t they spell it that way? Am I making sense to you? 

Many of the romanizations, like changing Peking to Beijing, still baffle me.

The Chinese government changed it to Beijing when they adopted the Pinyin. Most westerners pronounce it Bay-zhing. It is supposed to be Bay-jing. Hard on that j. O.k. – I get the jing part, but why did they use Bei, not Bay? I’ll never know, and it’s good fodder for a grump session.

And then there was Noah Webster. The teacher in him that was dissatisfied: generally with the state of education in the new Untied States, and specifically with instruction in the English language. He set out to standardize spelling, and for the most part he did a fine job. He changed gaol to jail. He did eliminate the u’s in words like colour and favour, ones we’d now pronounce here as coloor and favoor. We know that works like philosophy and psychology are not filosofy and scicology – it’s because of the Greek or Latin word roots. But why do we have rough, cough, and hiccough? 

“‘Tis a puzzlement!”