You say tomato. I say tomahto

The vagaries of English pronunciation have fascinated and appalled people for many years. Foreigners trying to learn English are particularly puzzled by the illogicalities in our language - especially in its pronunciation. Words like conduit, fuchsia, and impious, can present formidable problems for newcomers to the language. And is it VIT-a-min or VYT-a-min, CON-tro-ver-sy or con-TROV-er-sy, SHED-ule or SKED-ule?

The inconsistencies in English pronunciation are often illustrated by the assertion that the word fish can be pronounced as GHOTI. This has been attributed to Bernard Shaw but it may have derived from one of Shaw's fellow-enthusiasts for spelling reform. In his biography Bernard Shaw (1991), Michael Holroyd says: 'When an enthusiastic convert suggested that "ghoti" would be a reasonable way to spell "fish" under the old system (gh as in "tough", o as in "women", and ti as in "nation"), the subject seemed about to be engulfed in the ridicule from which Shaw was determined to save it.' The GHOTI story is so well-known that James Joyce referred to it in Finnegans Wake (1939): "Gee each owe tea eye smells fish."

In his Heptameron (1945), Hubert Phillips wrote a series of poems illustrating the difficulties of pronunciation, ending each line of verse with a misleading eye-rhyme. One of these poems begins:

I'm tired of the tympani, of the woodwind's blague;
Of the quickened pulse and the quotidian ague,
Let me be listless a little, let me be vague.

Rhymes like this can seem perverse. Why doesn't ratio rhyme with patio, or massage with passage, or daughter with laughter? And why don't ache and panache and Apache rhyme with one another? It may seem equally perverse that many pairs of words rhyme when they are spelt very differently from one another: like shot and yacht, oxen and coxswain, or orchard and tortured.

Proper names can be even more difficult. Leicester Square and the River Thames are notorious for being mispronounced by tourists. Brigid Brophy made fun of quaint Irish place-names in this verse from In Transit (1969):

You will find Dun Laoghaire
draoghaire
and should do everything in your power to avoghed a
visit to Drogheda.

Surnames can present as many difficulties as place-names. How is a newcomer to know that someone called Cholmondeley should be greeted as 'Chumley', Pepys should be pronounced as 'peeps', and someone named Dalziel should be addressed as 'Dee-ell'?

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More absorbing detail on wordplay - everything from puns, acrostics, palindromes, and tongue-twisters are in the new edition of The Oxford Guide to Word Games.