[Blindapple] a weird textalker discovery

Darcy Burnard dhsdarcy at gmail.com
Sat Nov 9 02:36:47 EST 2013


It’s still there in the latest version of OS X 10.9.  At least it’s there when you use Alex, or the other voices made by Apple.  If you use the  Nuance voices however, they do not say fish when encountering g h o t i.
Actually there are several things like that in the Apple voices, which I always assumed were jokes put in by the programmers.  For example, if you type 0 0 6, it says 0 0 6 as you would expect.  However, if you enter 0 0 7, the voice says double o 7, as in James Bond.
Darcy

On Nov 8, 2013, at 4:39 PM, John Schucker <gwynn at tds.net> wrote:

> That's based on an old joke, I believe by George Bernard Shaw. gh is f, in tough. o is i, as women. ti is sh, as in station. Except Wikipedia tells me Shaw never said it, and apparently it was actually used to seriously advocate spelling reform of English. It doesn't work, because it's taking things out of context. For instance, the ti is never pronounced as 'sh' outside of the -tion suffix. Apparently OS X 10.6 did this too, though Wikipedia says "the synthesizer", so I'm not sure if that would just apply to Alex. I also don't know if any later version of OS X does it, though I'm running 10.7 so I can check that. So apparently Apple's continuing the tradition, even though they had nothing to do wit hthe first one.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
> 
> On 11/8/2013 14:45, Byron Stephens wrote:
>> This one's dating back to when I had an actual apple2e. When you typed these letters, g h o t i without spaces, textalker would say fish, and it even does that on the emulator as well.
>> 
>> 
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