Re: Not phonetic but IN CONCLUSION

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting David Zitzelsberger <DavidZ@...>:
>
>
>>gh can only represent the f sound if it is both following ou and at the of
>>the root word.
>>o in woman is a debatable
>>ti can only represent the sh sound if it is part of tion.
>>
>>So, say again, what is ghoti? Because its not fish by any stretch of our
>>abused orthography.
>
>
>
> According to Mr Rosenfelder's interpretation of English spelling, it's oughta be
> "goatee". However, had I encountered as simply an unknown English word in a
> text, I'd probably rendered it as /gowtaj/, which doesn't seem to mean anything.
> "Go-tie"?
>
>                                                   Andreas
Ghoti looks Italian, so it could be /"gout_vi/ (but not /gou"ti:/).

I tend to pronounce unknown words and names ending in -i as /i/,
assuming that they're borrowings from non-English languages. We do have
a few words like "alibi" and "semi" (-trailer), and Latin plurals also
tend to be pronounced with /ai/. But lots of borrowed words like "taxi",
"spaghetti", and "origami" are pronounced with /i/. So I was surprised
to find that a place near Detroit called "Novi" is pronounced /nouvai/.
(One of the reasons it wóuld be nice to have a quasi-phonetic spelling
for English is so that you could tell how names are supposed to be
pronounced.)

(But certainly, initial gh- can only be /g/, except in foreign names
like Studio Ghibli, so the "ghoti" = "fish" pronunciation is just a joke.)

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