ghoti

[sudo] password for ghoti: sudo:!!: command not found ghoti@localhost ~/Videos [1]> oh...

But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.

For all the baroqueness, eqrtlk will never be an English word and ghoti will never be pronounced like fish (despite claims to the contrary).

Some clever bugger managed to get ghoti and ghoughpteighbteau doesn't fit.

The famous ghoti as an alternate spelling for fish.

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them.

Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.

I don't remember all the special syntax, I think the one I found was written more in plain English with more examples (and I don't think the one I found back then mentioned ghoti either), but can't be sure it's been so long - maybe it was just that page and I don't remember it.

To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.

English has words that are diffcult to pronounce and memorize too (see Ghoti [0] and "read/lead" [1]).

"Ghoti" is an artificial example that doesn't actually work if you account for the way positioning affects pronunciation.

I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies.