What does ghoti mean? (In English, not Bengali, that is.) A beard as sported by that Kentucky Fried colonel, maybe? And how is it pronounced? Answer: it has no meaning, and it is pronounced fish. Yes, fish: gh as in tough, o as in women and ti as in any word ending in -tion.

Ghoti was dreamed up by Bernard Shaw to illustrate the absurdities of English spelling. So it does. But what it has never done is persuade anyone, or at least enough people, that phonetic spelling, as Shaw proposed, would be an improvement. He left a large sum in his will to promote that cause. He was not the first. One Charles Butler, a rural clergyman, used phonetic spelling for a new edition of his treatise on bees as early as 1634.

The reverend bee-keeper was no fool. His was the first book in English to point out that a bee-hive is ruled by a queen, not a king. And, quite rightly, he thought the spelling of English — which in his days was not even uniform — was crazy. But could he get users to accept his remedy? No.

A few later scholars tried, and failed. When the Philological Society met in 1881, a traditionalist recorded, two such scholars had to admit that while they had the same aims, “the means by which they sought to attain them were altogether different, and, in the judgment of each, all which the other was doing in setting forth results equally dear to both was only tending to make the attainment of those results remoter than ever.”

This critic, Richard Chenevix Trench, was an archbishop; and for once — it’s a rare event in the Anglican Church — the archbishop was right and the humble priest 250 years earlier mistaken. Phonetic spelling is fine in Italian or Spanish, and many other languages; though in all of them regional differences of speech cast doubt on just how phonetic it really is. And if the English-speaking world could agree on the changes, we’d surely all get used to them: wot’s rong with fonetik, eniwei?

Agree to disagree

But would we agree? After 76 years of trying, Portugal and Brazil have not standardized the spelling of Portuguese. Many big German-language newspapers have rejected a recent, officially backed and very minor reform of its spelling. Imagine trying to get agreement on a root-and-branch reform of English not just in Britain but from America, Australia, India — and Google.

More important, we should not try. English is an utterly mongrel language. Its links to its multiple roots are obscure already. Its pronunciation is a madhouse. Why seek to bring order to this asylum by putting the lunatics in charge? Archbishop Trench was surely right to argue that “every word has two existences, as a spoken word and a written, and you have no right to sacrifice one to the other.”

And what would it lead to? “I can conceive no method of so effectually defacing and barbarizing our English tongue, of practically emptying it of all its hoarded wit, wisdom, imagination and history, of cutting the vital nerve which connects its present with the past” as phonetic spelling.

I’m not sure about the wit and wisdom, but Trench’s reference to history was spot-on. I doubt that we suffer — as he felt — from writing fancy, rather than the phant’sy, an echo of the Greek phantasia, used by scholars in the 17th century. But a great many of our words indeed spring from Latin or Greek. Why deliberately deprive them of their background and thus their resonance?

Even if we had the letters —Shaw reckoned we’d need 44 instead of 26 — and were happy to outdate every keyboard in the English-speaking world. No, forget it. Francis Bacon four centuries ago called the idea an “unprofitable subtlety”. He was too mild. It’s a nonsense.

thewordcage@yahoo.co.uk