As in--
F U N E X?
I F M Etc,,,
Paul- I think you have admirably illustrated the folly of expecting the English language to follow logical spelling and/or pronunciation rules. Although roughly 80% of English does follow such rules it is the exceptions that cause the problems. We, who grow up with it, accept the irregularities mostly without problem, but, as anyone who has attempted to learn a foreign language can show, it's really difficult to do, even with a phonetic language. My own problem with learning French was the concept of gender in language-- so at least there's an example where English is easier to learn.
And the word that we are discussing is an aboriginal one. They pronounce it as 'Gibber' with a hard 'G', and we spell it the way we do. 'Gibba' would be more appropriate I think (but the spell-check hates it!).
