The Case for Teaching History in Language Classes
The story of the Great Vowel Shift helps demystify English spelling for second-language learners.
One of my favourite anecdotes about the absurdity of English spelling, which I never fail to share with my ESL students, is frequently attributed to George Bernard Shaw, although it does not appear in any of his writings. The invented word ghoti is intended as a creative spelling of the word “fish”, with the gh pronounced as an “F” as in “enough” (ɪˈnʌf), the o pronounced as an “I” as in “women” (ˈwɪmɪn), and the ti pronounced as an “SH” as in “motion” (ˈmoʊʃən).
G.B. Shaw may indeed have been the originator of this clever illustration of the English language’s orthographic irregularities (He was, after all, a vocal proponent of spelling reform.) but even if he wasn’t, others have made creative use of the word “ghoti”, ranging from James Joyce’s inclusion of the word in Finnegans Wake (in the line “Gee each owe tea eye smells fish.”) to linguist Marc Okrand’s use of it as the constructed Klingon language’s word for, yes, fish ( ghotI’).
It’s a great linguistic meme, as well as a useful intro for one of my now-favourite topics for my ESL classes, which is the Great Vowel Shift of 1350–1600, a historical occurrence that I have found helps students from other countries and linguistic background make sense of…
