Why English spelling actually does make sense
English spelling is optimal, from a certain point of view
English spelling has a bad reputation. When you type in “english spelling is” into Google, the autocomplete brings up a record of frustration.
According to the world’s searches, English spelling is “hard”, “broken”, “a mess”, “so weird”, and “ridiculous.”
As anyone who has had to learn it can attest, English spelling seems to be a system without much logic. And whenever people gather to bemoan its evils, it won’t be long before someone brings up a famous five-letter word, the ultimate demonstration of the insanity of English spelling: ghoti, pronounced fish.
Gh as in enough, o as in women, and ti as in nation.
The joke is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw,1 and it’s not hard to see why. It’s got that classic Shaw wit, but like Professor Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, it’s a little too sure of itself.
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You, dear reader, are a competent reader of English. Imagine you’d never heard of ghoti and you saw it in a book. How would you pronounce it? Almost certainly like goaty.2
The reason the natural pronunciation of ghoti is goaty, rather than fish, is precisely because English spelling is, in fact, logical.
The letter combination gh does make an f-sound in enough, cough, and rough. But it only makes this sound after certain vowels, and never at the beginning of a word.
At the start of a word, gh is always a g-sound: ghost, ghee, ghastly. That is a rule, and it’s followed without exception.
It’s true that letter o sounds like a short i in the word women. But it only makes that sound in one word in the entire English language.3
And the sequence ti makes the sh-sound in nation. But only as part of the larger sequence -tion, and a few others. It never makes this sound at the end of a word.
I know, it’s poor form to fact-check a joke, but there is absolutely no way that ghoti can be pronounced fish.
The very word that was supposed to prove that English spelling is lawless and chaotic has only ended up proving that English is anything but. What makes English spelling difficult to master is not that it has no rules, but that it has too many.
I’ve criticized English spelling a fair bit in the history of this newsletter, see: how the printing press ruined English spelling and why every attempt to reform English spelling has failed. These articles have silently assumed what most people imagine: the English spelling system is a disaster.
But what if it’s not a disaster? According to a tradition in linguistic research going back to the 1960s, the English spelling system might just be… good, actually.
No one will ever call it perfect.4 But it’s more systematic — and far more useful — than its reputation suggests. It’s just that the whole system is rigged. It’s set up to benefit one group of English users over another. But don’t worry, that favoured group includes you… at least some of the time.
