Harry Mount
Alphabet Soup
Spell it out: the singular story of English spelling
By David Crystal
Profile Books 328pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Spelling obsessives will be familiar with the nineteenth-century joke suggesting that ‘fish’ should really be spelt ‘ghoti’: the ‘gh’ is pronounced ‘f’, as in ‘cough’; the ‘o’ is pronounced ‘i’, as in ‘women’; the ‘ti’ is pronounced ‘sh’, as in ‘nation’. Entertaining as the joke is, it is essentially cobblers, as David Crystal explains in this masterly book. You’d never use ‘ti’ to sound like ‘sh’ at the end of a word; and ‘gh’ is never pronounced ‘f’ at the beginning of one.
@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Last Tweets