Ghoti and Professor Jones
Ben Zimmer
We've long sought a solid attribution of "ghoti = fish" to George
Bernard Shaw: <http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxwhat04.html>.
Various cites have turned up from 1938 onwards, though nothing ties
"ghoti" to Shaw until 1961 (more than a decade after his death) [1].
But I recently found an article in the (London) Times archives that
suggests at least an indirect link to Shaw:
The Times, Tuesday, Nov 02, 1943; pg. 2
A Hard Spell For Fish
Professor Jones On Sounds And Letters
Dr. Daniel Jones, Professor of Phonetics in University
College, London, speaking on "Reform of English Spelling,"
astonished his audience at the college last night by
suggesting the word "fish" could be spelled "ghoti."
According to our present standards, he said, "gh" was the
sound of "f" in "rough"; the letter "o" in "women" sounded
like "i"; and "ti" in "nation" was like the last two
letters in "fish."
Prof. Jones (inventor of the IPA and coiner of "RP") was one of Shaw's
models for Henry Higgins, along with the elder phonetician Henry Sweet.
From a 1992 Guardian article:
Shaw said there were "touches of Sweet" in Henry Higgins,
but said this partly to avoid embarrassing the great figure
in phonetics at the time, Daniel Jones.
Jones was as much Shaw's model for Higgins as Sweet, and
when the film of Pygmalion was made, Jones was a professor
of phonetics - a title which Oxford was never willing to
bestow on Sweet. Jones directly advised Shaw, who probably
deserved Sweet's "boundless contempt" for his ignorance of
the subject. When it came to the filming, Jones provided
props that obviously came from his department at University
College, London, where at least one of them (a large vowel
diagram) still has a place of honour.
Shaw and Jones also worked together on the BBC's Advisory Committee on
Spoken English from 1926 to 1939. Jones, who was active in the
Simplified Spelling Society and would become its president in 1946, was
no doubt a great influence on Shaw's call for a simplied alphabet, as
presented in his 1941 preface to Richard Albert Wilson's _The Miraculous
Birth of Language_ [2].
So by the time Jones gave his "ghoti" speech in 1943, it's fair to
assume that he and Shaw were firmly connected in the consciousness of
British intelligentsia. It's easy to see how the "ghoti" anecdote could
have been transferred to Shaw, especially as he pursued his campaigns
for spelling reform in his waning years. Whether Shaw actually used the
example as Jones did has yet to be established.
What I find odd is that Jones would have used "ghoti" as proof of
orthographic irrationality in the first place, since a phonetician of
his stature would have recognized what a clumsy example it is (<gh> for
/f/ never appears initially, <ti> for /S/ never appears finally, etc.).
But perhaps Jones was simply warming up the crowd with the anecdote
(which by then had been circulating on both sides of the Atlantic for at
least five years), and then the Times article exaggerated its telling
(did Jones really "astonish" the audience?). In any case, the example
got attached to the amateur linguist Shaw instead, so it didn't end up
harming Jones' reputation in the long run.
[1]
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3F81BFCD...@midway.uchicago.edu
[2]
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j23/shawread.html
http://www.library.rdg.ac.uk/colls/special/read.html