this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Funny

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Loved the show Dress to Kill by Eddie Izzard. He thought thru was much better than through coming to the conclusion that through should be pronounced like thruff.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You say erbs, and we say herbs. Because there's a fucking h in it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago

I don't think the British need to pick the "who's worse about skipping letters" fight. Lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The only reason you pronounce the H is because at some point the brits decided dropping the H made you sound low class. So congrats on perpetuating the elitism

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I was quoting the stand up set.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah I should have put a /s on mine, I don't actually think you were being elitist

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

"through" is just cheating at Scrabble

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

do you have a flag?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

My father used to tell me that ghoti was pronounced "fish."

GH as in rough,

O as in women,

TI as in ration.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Yup. That's a pretty common one to explain the whimsy of the English language

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's not how any of that works.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It is phonetically how it works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

No it isn't. The letters "gh" doesn't make the "f" sound without the full "ough", you can't just take some of the letters out. Same with the "ti" in "tion". In addition, words trace their pronunciation from their origin. Words ending in "tion" are latin-derived, and shares an origion with "sion" (Mission, passion) and cion (suspicion). The reason that "ough" sometimes has an "f" sound is that originally it had a glottal stop, like the word "loch" in Scottish, but over time that glottal stop slipped and became an "f".

The point is, while certain letter sequences have surprising pronunciations in English, you can't just take those weird pronunciations out of context and create a new word. And you certainly can't say that "ghoti" is pronounced "fish".