From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!duke!unc!jqw Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: Re: words Article-I.D.: unc.3667 Posted: Fri Jul 9 01:05:37 1982 Received: Fri Jul 9 04:21:21 1982 While not quite "modern," some of the American spelling of words like "colour" come from Noah Webster's idea to simplify spelling. Most of his reforms failed, however. "ghoti" is, of course, pronounced the same as (**SPOILER WARNING**) "fish." "gh" as in "enough", "o" as in "women," "ti" as in "nation." Spanish is very much (not quite totally) a phonetically spelled language, too.