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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.
The word is intended to be pronounced in the same way as fish (/ f ɪ ʃ /), using these sounds: gh, pronounced / f / as in enough / ɪ ˈ n ʌ f / or tough / t ʌ f /; o, pronounced / ɪ / as in women / ˈ w ɪ m ɪ n /; ti, pronounced / ʃ / as in nation / ˈ n eɪ ʃ ən / or motion / ˈ m oʊ ʃ ən /.
Examples include the loss (in most dialects) of the [ç] and [x] sounds still reflected by the gh in words like night and taught, and the splitting of voiced and voiceless allophones of fricatives into separate phonemes (such as the two different phonemes represented by th ).
The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within a word. For instance, gh represents /f/ at the end of some words (tough / t ʌ f /) but not in others (plough / p l aʊ /). At the beginning of syllables, gh is pronounced /ɡ/, as in ghost / ɡ oʊ s t /.
The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in various spoken languages. It is not found in most varieties of Modern English but existed in Old English . [ 1 ] The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɣ , a Latinized variant of the Greek letter gamma , γ , which has this sound ...
So in words of French origin like Orange (orange), logieren (to lodge) or Etage (floor), the g is pronounced as [ʒ]; words taken from English like Gin or Gender use the /dʒ/-sound. However others, such as agieren (act, agitate), Generation (generation) or Gymnasium (academic high school), are pronounced with a hard g.
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.
The usual spelling in both cases was gh , which is retained today in words like night and taught. Those sounds were lost during later Middle English and Early Modern English. The timing of the process depended on the dialect; the fricatives were still pronounced in some educated speech in the 16th century, but they had disappeared by the late ...