Weekend Wordery: Ghoughpteighbteau
Last week I blogged about spelling reform in response to a post Matt Yglesias wrote a while back. I mentioned “Ghoti,” the re-spelling of fish (with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation) that illustrates the absurd possibilities of letter combinations in English. Another example is “Ghoughpteighbteau.” Try to work it out, if you’re in a sporting mood. I’ll even drop a hint or two in the comments. Otherwise, go straight to the answer here.
One more thing I wanted to comment on: Yglesias says “we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes.” But by and large that is not true. English spelling is mostly predictable and follows regular rules. According to Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct, about 84% of English words follow regular, predictable spelling patterns. And the words with the weirdest spellings (like people, women, done) are among the most commonly used words, which makes them relatively easy to memorize.
But the crux of Yglesias’ point still stands: it’s pretty hard for non-native speakers and even native speakers with little educational capital to reach levels of spelling attainment required to succeed in any venture where written communication is important. It is worth mentioning however that the reason isn’t just that English is so loopy. It’s that people who have attained sophisticated written language skills are generally intolerant of and biased against those who have not—even when there are plenty of complementary signals of intelligence and skill available. It would be interesting to explore those biases and find out how deep they run. Pretty deep, I’d guess.
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Hint #1: Dan Quayle wasn’t nearly this far off.
Hint #2: You say Ghoughpteighbteau, I say….