ghour awl “ghoti” eackspirts

I’m sure that you chose to read this contribution for one of the following reasons:
a) you recognized one of the words in the title
b) you haven’t got a clue what this is about, but would like to find out
c) out of pity with the author of this blog

To all of you, I say “thank you”, and may the rest of the article reward you :-)
As already hinted at in option (a), there is one famous word in the title, and it’s “ghoti”. And the reason it’s famous is because it is a particularly memorable word for proving that English orthography is … as special as it is. In this case, “gh” is taken to be pronounced as [f] (as in “laugh”), “o” as [i] (as in “women”), and “ti” as [ʃ] (as in “nation”), so that “ghoti” sounds like what you eat on Friday: [fiʃ].
For a long time, people were convinced that somehow this clever, erm, neospelling came from Bernard Shaw, who was known for his critical attitude to anything English, including English spelling (and, for that matter, his first first name, George – he omitted it whenever possible). So it was only appropriate to suppose that Shaw was the author of the “ghoti” joke. Alas, we were all wrong.

As various sources tell us:

Matthew Gordon of the University of Missouri-Columbia has antedated ghoti — all the way back to 1874. And the 1874 article is quoting a source from 1855, a year before Shaw was born.

While testing a trial subscription to the British Periodicals database, just “for fun“, Gordon discovered an article from the October 1874 issue of St. James’s Magazine by S. R. Townshend Mayer, entitled “Leigh Hunt and Charles Ollier”. In a letter from Ollier, who was a publisher, to Hunt, one of his authors, an idea of Ollier’s son William, then 31, is explained:

“My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling Fish. As thus: – G.h.o.t.i., Ghoti, fish. Nonsense! say you. By no means, say I. It is perfectly vindicable orthography. You give it up? Well then, here is the proof. Gh is f, as in tough, rough, enough; o is i as in women; and ti is sh, as in mention, attention, &c. So that ghoti is fish.” (p. 406)

Thanks, Harald, for letting me know.

(Oh, and of course you’ve found out about the headline by now, haven’t you?)

P.S.: I’d be grateful if you could tell me whether the phonetic symbol for “sh” displays alright on your screen. It works fine here, but when I had a look at it from one of the computers at school, there was an ugly square instead of the ‘long s’.