It's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)

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calfuris 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

"Ghoti" is an artificial example that doesn't actually work if you account for the way positioning affects pronunciation. Pull up a list of words that start with "gh": none of them (unless "ghoti" itself is on the list) start with an /f/ sound. You'll find the same for words ending in "ti" and the /ʃ/ sound.

I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!

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Barrin92 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

this is my personal favorite: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

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Koshkin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.

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1718627440 2 days ago | parent [-]

> not about pronunciation

> about [...] the way a word is written [vs.] the way it is spoken.

That concept is called pronunciation.

	▲	Koshkin 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not exactly. Pronunciation varies between dialects and accents; it is the subject of a linguistic discipline called "phonology"; writing systems or difficulties arising from their "irregularities" with respect to spoken word do not concern it. Put differently, speech and pronunciation, while related, are not the same.