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In English, gh historically represented [x] (the voiceless velar fricative, as in the Scottish Gaelic word loch), and still does in lough and certain other Hiberno-English words, especially proper nouns. In the dominant dialects of modern English, gh is almost always either silent or pronounced /f/ (see Ough).
In Old English, k and g were not silent when preceding n . Cognates in other Germanic languages show that the k was probably a voiceless velar plosive in Proto-Germanic. For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of knight, Knoten which is a cognate of knot, etc.
A silent u can indicate a hard pronunciation in words borrowed from French (as in analogue, league, guide) or words influenced by French spelling conventions (guess, guest); a silent h serves a similar purpose in Italian-derived words (ghetto, spaghetti). A silent e can occur at the end of a word – or at the end of a component root word that ...
In Welsh, the digraph ll fused for a time into a ligature.. A digraph (from Ancient Greek δίς (dís) 'double' and γράφω (gráphō) 'to write') or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk, half, calf, etc., the w in two and sword, gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though, daughter, night, brought, and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
Also note a combination digraph and cluster as seen in length with two digraphs ng , th representing a cluster of two consonants: /ŋθ/ (although it may be pronounced /ŋkθ/ instead, as ng followed by a voiceless consonant in the same syllable often does); lights with a silent digraph gh followed by a cluster t , s : /ts/; and compound words ...
A' maidin neochiontas na h-óige (Uilleam MacDhunléibhe, 19th century). The alphabet (Scottish Gaelic: aibidil, formerly Beith Luis Nuin from the first three letters of the Ogham alphabet) now used for writing Scottish Gaelic consists of the following Latin script letters, whether written in Roman type or Gaelic type: