2020年7月6日 · In English, we have many words ending in or containing “gh”, but in some cases, the two letters are silent, while in others, it is pronounced as “f” . We have the words tough, rough, and draught, which pronounce "gh" as an "f" sound, while the words height, weight, through, drought, and many others do not pronounce the sound at all.

2015年5月6日 · So if gh in word-initial position and gh in word-internal position had the same historical source, it would be a good insight. But that assumption is false as best I can tell. Gh in word-initial position was a scribal variant of g, pronounced /g/. It has no historical relation to the word-internal sound spelled gh.

2011年6月29日 · The spelling gh was one of the usual ways of representing this sound in Middle English. The words are pronounced differently now because they underwent sound changes. In all languages, words change in pronunciation over time.

2018年5月25日 · I am not a native speaker, and I find it very interesting that night is written with gh. Why is it spelled this way?

As for "ghoul" with the Arabic origin "ghul," the /gh/ sound is distinctly Arabic and made by pressing the back of the tongue close to the soft palate without completely closing the two while attempting the /g/ sound. It spelled with the gh digraph. English spelling of Arabic names that begin with Gh include Ghanem, Ghala and Ghadeer.

2016年8月13日 · In the dominant dialects of modern English, gh is almost always either silent or pronounced /f/ (see ough). It is thought that before disappearing, the sound became partially or completely voiced to [ɣx] or [ɣ], which would explain the new spelling - Old English used a simple h - and the diphthongization of any preceding vowel.

Is Old English responsible for creating the /f/ sound from ph, as in Philip, Pharoah, Physics, Sophia, etc? Many European countries keep the f for all of their /f/-sounding letters, as in Sofia and Stefan, for example.

In most words where /x/ changed to /f/ in English, the sound came after a round vowel. We can therefore describe the change as labialization: the influence of another sound pronounced with the lips caused the fricative /x/ to change into a fricative pronounced with the lips.

2022年9月12日 · This will require most of a day’s free work, so good luck and godspeed to whoever attempts this: anyone who believes this question can be suitably answered in our format will need to synthesize information contained within the OED entries for burg and burgh and borough, and the letter ‹g› and the ‹gh› digraph, as well as …

2019年8月17日 · There's an interesting note on the Wikipedia entry: The pronunciation of Van Gogh varies in both English and Dutch. Especially in British English it is /ˌvæn ˈɡɒx/ or sometimes /ˌvæn ˈɡɒf/. American dictionaries list /ˌvæn ˈɡoʊ/, with a silent gh, as the most common pronunciation. In the dialect of Holland, it is [ˈvɪnsɛnt fɑŋˈxɔx], …