That one word accounting for the “o” is an extremely common everyday word.
While some other languages do have letters or digraphs pronounced differently in different word positions, the differences are more easily understood. For example, German has the same kind of -tion words, originally from French, as English. And like in English, the ti in those words is pronounced differently from how it sounds in other words. But German has far fewer of these words, and their pronunciation has stayed much closer to French, retaining a generally Romance stress pattern and setting the words apart from most typical German words.
By contrast, these words are far more common in English, many of them have supplanted native words for basic everyday concepts, and their pronunciation has evolved over centuries to conform to a typically Germanic stress pattern while keeping the original spelling. In German, the -tion words stand out, but in English they hide in plain sight.
A lot of languages form vowel/consonant relationships which lead to variant-looking spellings. It is somewhat common for ‘i’ and ‘e’ to soften/modify the preceding vowel, whereas the other vowels do not. Particularly confusing for English speakers are words like “bacchetta”, Italian for “stick”, which has the ‘h’ in there to prevent the ‘e’ from softening the ‘c’, but to us it looks like it should have kind of the opposite effect. ‘ti’ should realistically be more like a ‘ch’ than an ‘sh’ sound, but, 'tis what 'tis.
“ti” in words like “motion” could have gone through a historical intermediate stage where the “i” served as what I’ll call a y-glide – basically just the semivowel “y” (IPA /j/) coming after a consonant and before a vowel. An easy contrastive example in (American) English are the words “cannon” and “canyon” (note, however, that the y-glide is an aspect of pronunciation and not of spelling – see below).
Anyway, that y-glide coming after a “t” can even in Modern English yield a “ch” sound (IPA /tʃ/), though today this only happens in fairly constrained phonetic environments. Since a y-glide often precedes a “u” vowel in English, you can hear the “t + y-glide = ch” (IPA /tj/ > /tʃ/) in words like “virtue”, ritual", and “statute” versus the preserved y-glide in words like “impure”, “cute”, “argue”, and “butane”. Note also the slangy abbreviation of “situation” as “sitch”.
It seems reasonable that in an earlier period of spoken English, words like “motion” were once pronounced “moh-chən”. Would have to do a little research and see if this kind of pronunciation of “-tion” has been attested in earlier periods of English speech.
There’s also some complexities due to how French pronunciation has changed over the centuries. That language has had a parallel palatalization process* similar to English’s. Depending on a word’s history, we have a mess of pronunciations. For example, compare “cap”, “captain”, “chapel”, “chief”, “chef” which all came into English from the same evolving French words from Latin “caput”.
I could probably write a whole book on the development of English the relationships between pronunciation and orthography, but I think at this point I would be pushing up daisies halfway through the research phase.
I’d like to put in a general recommendation for https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/. Kevin Stroud (an attorney doing this podcast as a hobby thing, I believe) has covered some or a lot of this – but it’s taken him a few years to get up to Shakespeare, with whom he’s maybe halfway through.
The position of the letters is important in determining how they’re pronounced. Is “ghost” pronounced “fist”?
And the assertion was that “ghoti” would be pronounced “fish,” not that the letters have more than one pronunciation. Many letters have more than one pronunciation: “c,” for instance, and all vowels.
For instance, take the “a” in cake, and say “cat” should be pronounced the same way. It’s not. There are rules governing pronunciation, which is what I’m pointing out here. “Ghoti” ignores the rules on how words are pronounced, by choosing sounds out of context.
The rules can be complex when you’re learning the language, but they are there. You can’t pronounce “Luxury Yacht” as “Throatwarbler Mangrove.”
Today I learned about AT&T Long Lines. A very ambitious, complex, and expensive communication system installed in the U.S. in the 1950s. Many of the towers still exist. This one is only a few miles from me.
It looks almost stereotypical as a piece of 1950s technological hardware… somewhat like early rocket gantries used to launch Viking and V2-Aerobee rockets.
