IS FISH = GHOTI?

BY Rashida Paghdiwala

 <gh> can only be pronounced /g/ as in ghost, gherkin, and ghoul. The letter <o> in women is pronounced as in tip, <ti> can sound like in ship only in endings such as <tion> and <tient>. (Richard Venezky in The American Way of Spelling

 that ough does not amount to /f/ gh in the cluster ough takes the /f/ sound o Similar is the case with the word laugh : gh does not appear as a single syllable by itself.nly in collocation with the preceeding vowels

 In no other word in the English language does gh come at the start of a word to represent the phoneme /f/.

 The word ghoti is supposed to be pronounced as / f / Gh as / / as in tough, rough, enough ,laugh where gh takes the /^f/ sound o as /I/ as in women ( w m n)

 the graphemes ough do not correspond consistently to the /^f/ sound. Bough rhymes with cow Cough rhymes with off though rhymes with jo through rhymes with too

 Ti represents the phoneme / / (sh) only when it combines with the suffixes ous , an , al , ent , a and o -tious as in ambitious -tion as in caution - tial as in partial -tia as in militia Tio as in Horatio

 Consider the word petit or the word petition . Here ti (underlined syllable) does not take the / / sound; rather it takes the /ti/ sound. Further i at the end of a word always takes I or y sound. It is never silent.

Thus FISH IS NOT EQUAL TO GHOTI .