ABSTRACT
Do you know what ‘ghoti’ means? The answer is ‘fish’. The idea behind the word is attributed to Bernard Shaw, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. It has been used to illustrate the way that English contains many words that seem to have irregular spellings. If you take the sound of ‘gh’ in enough, the ‘o’ in women, and the ‘ti’ in station, you get ‘fish’! It is the irregularities of English that make it demanding for children to learn and teachers to teach.
