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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 ...
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 ...
gh represents /ɡ/ (voiced velar plosive) at the beginning of words (ghost), represents /f/ (voiceless labiodental fricative in enough) or is silent at the end of words (sigh). ph represents /f/ (voiceless labiodental fricative), as in siphon. rh represents English /r/ in words of Greek origin, such as rhythm.
GH pronounced /f/ use F, drop the silent letter in the foregoing digraph: cough→cof, laugh→laf, enough→enuf GH pronounced /ɡ/ use G: aghast→agast, ghost→gost –GM pronounced /m/ use M: apothegm→apothem, paradigm→paradim –GUE after a consonant, a short vowel or a digraph representing a long vowel or diphthong: drop silent –UE
The lack of spoken words in a silent review, which requires an audience to infer whether a reviewer likes a product or not, may seem silly. However, the same kind of nonverbal communication occurs ...
Not every English word that contains a gh was originally spelled with a yogh: for example, spaghetti is Italian, where the h makes the g hard (i.e., [ɡ] instead of [dʒ]); ghoul is Arabic, in which the gh was /ɣ/. The medieval author Orm used this letter in three ways when writing Early Middle English.