Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Aperture" channel.

  1. Actually, English spelling cares about Where in the syllable the characters (including digraphs, trigraphs, and tetragraphs) are when determining their sounds.* Ghoti cannot, in fact, be read as "fish" only as "goat-y" (that is, either "goat-like" or a type of beard, depending on which of the homophones you want). The same nonsensical violation of the system that is required to read it as "fish" also produces another amusing possibility though: all parts of it appear as "silent" letters in other words. So if "fish" is a valid reading, so is... Well... A null value. A silent word. *Also where the (variable and completely unmarked, mind you) stresses fall (and yes, English has more than one stress point per word if it has enough syllables). It's actually a Lot less chaotic than it looks once you allow for that. I mean, there's still no good excuse for why on earth the nonsensical disaster that is -ough hasn't been sorted out at some point (its the result of a whole series of sound changes (possibly across multiple dialects and or languages, it's been a while since I read up on it), with the spelling only representing Some of them.), And a couple of other things have their entire logic amount to "some idiots with a latin fetish but little understanding of Either language came to be influential 'authorities' on the matter for a while." (On a related note, the Long debunked "rules" about preposition placement and split infinitives come from the same source... But in the last 5-10 years I've seen an awful lot of downright Strange sentences resulting from (mostly) Americans who seem to have decided that they apply...)
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