LINGUISTIC MISCONCEPTIONS

2023-08-11

Here are a few common misconceptions about languages.

Ghoti

It is often said that English spelling rules are so illogical that you could feasibly spell the word fish as ghoti. The reasoning is this:

• gh from enough
• o from women
• ti from nation

Put these together and you get ghoti. Obviously, this is untrue. There is a reason why you automatically pronounce ghoti similarly to goatee; English spelling rules simply don't work like that.

While it is true (and maybe illogical) that these spellings make such sounds, they only make these sounds in specific parts of a word. This concept, known as phonotactics, explains away this misconception.

• gh only sounds like f when following ou or au
• o is only pronounced i in the word women
• ti only sounds like sh when followed by a vowel

You could however, write the word fish as pfysche.

Inuit has many words for snow

This one is pretty ambiguous, but the idea is that, because Inuit peoples are around snow a lot, they have more words for it.

The original claim comes from Franz Boas, who, in his study of Eskaleut languages in Canada, found that they had around the same number of words for snow as English, but the polysynthetic nature of the language allows each word root to be modified to create greater nuance. This means that noun-adjective pairs, and even entire sentences can be expressed as single words in these languages.

Depending on how you define word, you could say that Inuit languages have a not-exceptional number of words for snow, or that they have a near infinite amount.

On a related note, English actually has 12-40 words that can mean snow, and the Sámi languages in northern Scandinavia have been found to have as many as 300 words for snow, and as many as 1000 words for reindeer.

Made-up words

Another common one i've seen is people (like this article) confidently stating that certain words are "not a word."

The selection of words that some claim are fake is completely arbitrary, but are often slang terms, or perceived grammatical errors. At risk of catastrophically dating this post, I'll list a few below.

• rizz
• irregardless
• ain't
• orientate
• ginormous
• funner

All words are made up, if a word is in common use but isn't in a dictionary, that is a failure of the dictionary.