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by ReverseCold 592 days ago
> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way

Are you sure about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

3 comments

Posted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

"Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".

That's such a dumb example because it claims to follow english rules for those letters while ignoring the actual rules. It makes a somewhat humorous joke, but people pretending that it means anything linguistically are either ignorant or intentionally trying to confuse people.
shure!
reads like it would be pronounced with an aspirated -s- not sh.