In my Cert Ed course classes today not only was I the only person who had ever hear of Sapir-Whorf (and knew what a load of old tosh it is*) but I was also the only person on a considerably more lowbrow note who knew what "ghoti" is.

Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed at being the only person raising a hand. Makes me feel like Lisa Simpson.

(*Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was only mentioned in passing as pretty much a load of bunkum. I wouldn't want anyone getting the idea that we're being taught by someone who thinks the Eskimos have fifty words for snow.)

Good for you!

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I was also the only person on a considerably more lowbrow note who knew what "ghoti" is.

Truly, a Mr Chips in embryo!

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I was also the only person on a considerably more lowbrow note who knew what "ghoti" is.

But how many persons on a less lowbrow note knew?

Remember "ghoti bowl," one of our early posters?

I expect shu does.

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Originally posted by shufitz:

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I was also the only person on a considerably more lowbrow note who knew what "ghoti" is.

But how many persons on a less lowbrow note knew?

OK, I'll concede that sometimes I ought to use commas.

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I was also the only person on a considerably more lowbrow note who knew what "ghoti" is.

I was taught that the word spelt "fish", its being a demonstration of the eccentricities of English spelling.

I never though ghoti was particularly clever. None of those rules apply out of context, and one only occurs rarely.

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I never though ghoti was particularly clever.

Ah, yes, George Bernard Shaw summed up quite nicely: not particularly clever.

Indeed, however the lecturer's point, perhaps with a rather irrelevent example, was that not just spelling, but all language (written and spoken) , is essentially arbitrary - a set of agreed symbols and rules which could be anything as long as the people communicating do agree on them.

Whereas my point was that "ghoti" is a very trivial and extremely well known trifle mainly amusing to children which I had assumed was extremely well known but discovered to my surprise that a whole classroom full of Englisg teachers had never encountered it.

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Whereas my point was that "ghoti" is a very trivial and extremely well known trifle mainly amusing to children which I had assumed was extremely well known but discovered to my surprise that a whole classroom full of English teachers had never encountered it.

That IS surprising! Im just a stupid lawn mower mechanic, and I've known about it for at least forty years.

I've lately been looking into the Russian alphabet (well, OK, they say "alphaveet") and find that it's wonderfully phonetic. What say we scrap all those nonsensical English pronunciations and just use the Cyrillic alphabet!

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Whereas my point was that "ghoti" is a very trivial and extremely well known trifle mainly amusing to children which I had assumed was extremely well known but discovered to my surprise that a whole classroom full of Englisg teachers had never encountered it.

I hadn't heard of it before Wordcraft.

I hadn't heard about ghoti until Wordcraft, either.

alphaveet

Asa, congrats on learning a new alphabet. There are some problems / exceptions with Russian orthography, его 'his' is written with a г (g) but is pronounced /jevo/. There's a subtle confusion between /a/ and /o/ (cf. the initial sounds in the words for 'he', 'she', and 'they'), and что 'what' is pronounced as though written што. But it's nothing compared to say, English or Tibetan.