George Bernard Shaw, the famous British writer and Nobel Prize winner, was so annoyed with the irregularities of the English spelling system that he left all his money after his death to reforming it! His most famous example is the following word he created out of the way parts of different words are pronounced: ghoti. Strange as this word looks, it's actually easy to read if you can decipher the pronunciations he was mocking:- The gh is pronounced like the final consonants of enough.
- The o is pronounced like the middle vowel of women.
- The ti is pronounced like the middle consonant of nation.
Did you get it? If not, here's a hint: It's a kind of creature we often find swimming in water.
Yes, it's fish! Tee, hee.Perhaps you would like to learn another language since English is so cray-cray. If so you may want to give Swedish a try. Things sound like they're spelled and it's got a lot of root-word similarities with English, for example, "House - hus", "Fish - fisk", "stone- sten" and so on. There's a program in Minnesota I'd love to try with my kids where they teach Swedish through immersion. It's called Concordia Language Villages, and they do teach other languages as well. So check it out if you want to head west, it sounds like a lot of fun, but personally I'd go back to the motherland to brush up my Swedish. Or try Duolingo on-line.
Ha det gott!
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