Ghoti - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My son once bemoaned how difficult he found it was to spell words properly. I had to sympathasize with him. After all, the words "soap" and "hope" could have been "sope" and "hoap".

Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, once addressed this issue with a cartoon of a hoodlum with an apparent head cold pushing a plowshare through a massive bowl of cookie dough with the caption "The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough."  with all of those "...ough" words having different pronunciations.

However, we should also consider the reverse idea of words that sound alike but use different spellings such as in this nonsense sentence:

"Please freeze these trees."

Now imagine seeing this as:

"Pleeze frese theese trease."  -  or  -  "Plese freese thease treeze."  -  or  -  "Plees frease theeze trese."

Might we say that these different spellings can really get in our way?

George Bernard Shaw took up this issue with a vengeance.

Shaw said that the word "fish" should be spelled "ghoti" where "gh" was the consonant sound of the word enough, that the "o" was the vowel sound of the word women and that the "ti" was the consonant sound of any word ending in "..tion".

He pushed this idea to the extreme by developing his own written alphabet and then publishing the story "Androcles and The Lion" both in that new alphabet and in standard English, side by side on opposing pages of a book. This allowed you the reader to see for yourself how much more efficient his new alphabet was and be therefore convinced that the standard English alphabet should be replaced with Shaw's own alphabet.

The truth be told, the standard English text took up the full page width, but Shaw's alphabet text occupied only about two-thirds of the page width which was clearly an efficiency improvement.

It was Shaw's intent that his new alphabet would catch on and become common usage, but of course, it didn't happen that way.

By the way, guess what happened when I put the text of this memo into the spell-check.

Comments

[John Dunn]

Oops. I forgot to offer a URL to show what Shaw came up with. There are many, but this is a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xRuVvl5F28

[William Watson]

Are you familiar with "The Chaos"? Here's a link to a Dutch site with the full version:

http://4umi.com/charivarius/chaos/

It's more about pronunciation than spelling, so is the other way around from your son's complaint.

Enjoy!

William