>>46820216(Letters between slashes are IPA)
Let's take the infamous and frankly retarded "ghoti" for example. It's pronounced "fish", according to english spelling reform proponents. Let's break down why that is retarded:
>"gh" as /f/An artifact of sound change, it used to be an /x/ sound (as in loCH), that got hit by lenition and "softened", meaning that the sound was dropped or turned into /f/, but only at the end of a word. Word finality is not a trivial matter since sounds trail off, which is how lenition happened to begin with, ghoti has it at the start, it can't be pronounced as /f/. In fact, initial "gh" were introduced by Dutch typesetters to keep the "G" from softening, and it's always /g/.
>"ti" as "sh" (/ʃ/)This is another artifact, but this time of borrowings. The "-tion" suffix was introduced to english through words borrowed from french. There, "-tion" is pronounced /sjɔ̃/, compare "potion" in french (/pɔ.sjɔ̃/) and english (/ˈpoʊ.ʃən/). Turning "TION" from latin into "SION" or "THION" (-cion in spanish, poción, /poˈθjon/) is a very common sound change in romance language, english adopted it and iterated on it. You'll notice something, I've only mentioned "-tion". That's because "ti" can only be /ʃ/ in that set of letters. In ghoti, it's not part of it, thus it's "ti", as in "tea".
>"o" as "i"Supposedly from "women", it's one of those actual irregularities english has. It just happens in languages, since they're not constructed. French, which I mentioned earlier, has tons and tons of rules which most french people will have at least heard of once in school, but there are still legitimate irregularities. I don't know off the top of my head why "vingt" and "vin" are homophonous, for example (unless there's a word with a vowel after "vingt", but that's french for you).
The conclusion is that "ghoti" is just "goatee" and the people that are still propping it up as an example to reform english spelling are ignorant.
