The ghoti thing never works, because it disobeys English spelling rules.

gh never sounds like f except at the end of a word. When a the beginning (except perhaps for a few possible recent borrowings) it always sounds a g.
ti never sounds like sh. tion often sounds like shen or shun, but ti never sounds like sh on its own.

As someone trained to be a descriptivist linguist (which means I'm not supposed to say how things should be, rather just as they are), I'm adamantly of the opinion that if schools actually taught reading rules (or norms, if you prefer), rather than just forcing memorization of spelling, we had have a lot less confusion. Yes, English spelling would still be crazy and there would still be myriad exceptions, but it would make a lot more sense to everyone.

Gads, that was awful. Call myself a linguist and then produce a post riddled with errors :(

I only log on to check my games (still a busy time), and I see something that needs clarifying:

"þ and ð" are "th and dh" or for more standard the "th" in "thin" and the "th" in "then"

Thorn þ and eth ð are the unvoiced and voiced /th/ sounds, respectively. "Thin" and "then" are the correct examples, but this /dh/ business for eth is incorrect. That transcription never occurred in English, and as has already been pointed out, we must be careful not to confuse which language we are trying to transcribe. The whole argument for a reform of English is that words are not spelled as they are heard. In the South, there are some people who do not voice /th/ in "then," and so it sounds like "thin." There are people who write what they hear (as OE and ME speakers did), and so you get such classy sentences as "An thin I was fixin to go to tha store." How atrocious! This whole discussion would be horribly impossible if we all wrote like we heard!

Anyway, if you wish to speak of sounds, I recommend using the usual conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet and putting sounds between slashes, so /a/ is different than a (a sound as opposed to a letter, and yes, there is a difference!), because in Vietnamese, a is pronounced /aː/ (like in "hat") even though Americans usually think of a as /a/ (as in "father"). The IPA can be found on this very good wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Symbols_and_sounds) and you can click on any of the characters to hear their IPA sound.

Please note on the IPA chart the dental fricatives. You will find a theta and an eth. What happened to thorn? you might ask. Well, click on the theta, scroll to the bottom of the page where it shows Icelandic. There will be a thorn in the word, but a theta in the IPA transcription. They indicate the same sound, but /θ/ represents the actual sound and þ is just a letter. I hope all of this information helps the discussion to be more fruitful.

"Thin" and "then" are the correct examples, but this /dh/ business for eth is incorrect. That transcription never occurred in English, and as has already been pointed out, we must be careful not to confuse which language we are trying to transcribe.

Truth; it was merely a short explanation for those who might know something (Tolkien's Elvish in Roman characters, for instance), but not understand the phonetic terminology. If we were trying to create a phonetic transcription of sorts and were retaining digraphs, "dh" would be the natural choice for the voiced interdental fricative.

@Veneftir, I just read through page 4. Gods, that was painfully difficult. Sorry that I chose your quote to speak to directly. There were any number of better posts to select and tear apart.

@everyone else, "long" and "short" have real meanings and designations. When you say "In German, a long vowel indicates how long you hold it, but that's not true in English," you perpetuate a lie that you were taught in kindergarten (speaking of German, what a great word kindergarten is!). "Short i" is not "i as in fit" and "long i" is not "i as in bite." "I as in bite" is actually a diphthong (diph-thong, not dip-thong -_-), specifically /ai/. Think about the /a/ as in father and the /i/ in machine, say one then the other, now say them together, now blend them. There is your "long" /ai/. If you doubt me, check the IPA wiki article I linked to earlier.

@dumbell in the southern English accent does the word bath use a long sound or a short vowel sound (technically)? It sounds long to my ears, but Mujus says that sound is still a short sound, but I have read otherwse. (At least I think that is what he is saying)
Similar sounding words are dance, France, grass (southern English not northern). Is that sound long or short?

I think I have figured it out
a: is a long sound, right?

The pretentious a (like using art for bath) is not "long". Ray gun has a long a (although I guess it could be argued to be a dipthong). The long vowels sound like the first part of their names except 'u' which start with a 'y' sound but ends with the long 'u'.

It's not pretentious. Its the normal Australian  pronunciation and most people in southern England say it that way.
I don't really know. I looked up this website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
Scroll down to the section Suprasegmentals and look at the table below. It is listed as a long vowel sound.

.... I see what you are saying, i think.
So is /a:/ like the a in ray?

I was joking spyman. It was "pretentious" as in how Thursten Howell III would say it. :-)

"Long" and "short" in English as described in kindergarten are meaningless. Please look at this handy chart of English "short" and "long" vowels. You will notice the "long" vowels are all diphthongs (diph-thongs, not dip-thongs!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Short_and_long_vowels_in_English

I would point you to "The Origins and Development of the English Language" by John Algeo for a fuller discussion on how long and short vowels are *not* different phonemes, philologically speaking, but in American curriculum, the lie that they are different phonemes is pervasive. (the wiki article also says length may be different phonemes, but this is incorrect and unsourced).

@spyman, I think what you're trying to distinguish are phonemes, not vowel length. Even in one household, you may have five different lengths regularly given to /a:/ in "bath." However, it would be strange for one household to pronounce "bath" with /a:/ and /a/ by different members. In fact, I have never heard anyone pronounce "bath" with /a/ instead of /a:/.
If you really are concerned with vowel length, I suppose the bath /a:/ is a longer length, but I pronounce the dance /a:/ a bit short. Length is more dialectal in English than in other languages, such as French or Russian where length is very important as it indicates stress.

"So is /a:/ like the a in ray?"

Ray is transcribed using IPA as /reɪ/. The wiktionary (and most good English dictionaries) will state pronunciation in IPA.

That's all right Draug. Like Pete U says (and I have work colleagues who are from northern England who would agree) the way I say it is the "poncey" way ;-)

Thanks dubmdell for the link. I'll read it later (I am at work now).

I always hear about this diphthong of adding a slight "e" to the end, but I don't tend to pronounce my words that way. For instance, WiFi and Why have the same sound to me and the "i"s don't even in even the slightest "e" sound. I only add the sound on Hawaii because of the second "i". In that word I say all four vowels just slurring the last three into one mushed up vowel. Although I think, with the accent/diacritic/whatever-it-is properly placed, I should make a slight "stutter" after the first "i".

Well, Draug, WiFi is short for Wireless Fidelity, so the "why" of "Wi" is that it is part of a larger word. And you're correct about Hawaii being more of a stuttering Ha wa a I I.
I am unsure what you mean about diphthongs and "slight e"s. if you mean how "bit" and "bite" are different, then that's a French influence. One problem with diphthongs in English is, the diphthongs are often recorded in one character instead of two or three. Example already given with "I as in bite" being /ai/. In German, the diphthongs are easy to see because they're always represented with multiple vowels, such as "ein, Bier, Euler."

Another problem with English is the loss of diacritics leading to diphthongs. Even just 100 years ago, we spelled coordinate with an umlaut so that the o's would not diphthong ("coördinate"). Now you'll find people meshing the o's together so it sounds more like quart than co-ord.

*Ha wa I I

But I'm saying I don't say "I" like "eye" or "aye" (with a light long e sound on the end, the same sound at the end of Hawaii).