George Bernard Shaw, the eccentric nineteenth-century Irish playwright, held some controversial beliefs, including his support for eugenics and opposition to vaccination. However, one of his strongest convictions was his disdain for the English spelling system, which he often criticized in his writings. Shaw’s unconventional approach to spelling included dropping apostrophes in contractions, creating his own phonetic alphabet, and using archaic orthographies. One of his most famous linguistic experiments was respelling the word fish as ghoti, using the letters gh as in rough, o as in women, and ti as in motion. While there is some debate about whether Shaw actually did this, it remains a popular linguistic thought experiment referenced in works like Finnegan’s Wake and even in Klingon, where the word ghotl means “fish” in the constructed language. A fascinating exploration of the arbitrariness of language!
