There was a Steam Gala over three days (10-12 Oct) at the Great Central Railway, Loughborough. Loughborough ... six (arguably 7) phonemes in twelve letters - ridiculous! Wasn't it George Bernard Shaw who said that you can pronounce GHOTI as 'fish' using examples elsewhere in the English spelling 'system'?
Sylvie and I went to Quorn (make what you want of that, but we are not vegetarians) on the Sunday. We saw six different - very different - steam locos in service. I include a few video clips which I will attempt to put in the next postings. Enjoy them!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
Do your research! It only takes a few seconds on Google to discover that it most likely wasn't Bernard Shaw who proposed 'ghoti' (many thanks to the gospel of wikipedia).
See also here:
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxwhat04.html
I quote:
'"Ghoti" is popularly attributed to George Bernard Shaw. But Michael Holroyd, in Bernard Shaw: Volume III: 1918-1950: The Lure of Fantasy (Chatto & Windus, 1991), p. 501, writes that Shaw "knew that people, 'being incorrigibly lazy, just laugh at spelling reformers as silly cranks'. So he attempted to reverse this prejudice and exhibit a phonetic alphabet as native good sense [...]. But when an enthusiastic convert suggested that 'ghoti' would be a reasonable way to spell 'fish' under the old system [...], the subject seemed about to be engulfed in the ridicule from which Shaw was determined to save it." We have not been able to trace the name of the "enthusiastic convert".'
And then go here for the argument that Ghoti cannot be a spelling for fish:
http://www.3dham.com/ghoti.html
And then, in case youre still ghotiing for answers, see this
http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/ling006.html
which points out how regular the distribution of 'gh' is in English.
Thank you, anyway, for sending this reader on a fascinating journey.
I like the trivia on the Wikipedia page especially... never knew that Batman took an interest in spelling reform!
Sorry for the deleted comments, by the way - it took me a few goes to get used to formatting comments.
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