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It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear /ee/ sound and unless this is known, words such as sufficient, veil and their look like exceptions. There are so few words where the ei spelling for the / ee / sound follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words: receive , conceive , deceive (+ the related ...
An exception is the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives: in the words longer/longest, stronger/strongest, younger/youngest, the [ɡ] is pronounced in most accents. The pronunciation with [ɡ] is thus possible only before a vowel; before a consonant, the only possibility is a bare [ŋ] .
Conversely, gh is never pronounced /f/ in syllable onsets other than in inflected forms, and is almost never pronounced /ɡ/ in syllable codas (the proper name Pittsburgh is an exception). Some words contain silent letters , which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation.
The sound of a hard g (which often precedes the non-front vowels a o u or a consonant) is usually the voiced velar plosive [ɡ] (as in gain or go) while the sound of a soft g (typically before i , e , or y ) may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language.
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
An exception is the acronym GNU. In addition, the digraph gh , in the dominant dialects of Modern English , is almost always either silent (as in “bough”, “thorough”, “furlough”, “night” or "weight") or pronounced /f/ (as in “tough”, “enough“ or “laugh”).
According to the Neogrammarian hypothesis, a diachronic sound change affects simultaneously all words in which its environment is met, without exception. Verner's law is a famous example of the Neogrammarian hypothesis, as it resolved an apparent exception to Grimm's law.
A sonority hierarchy or sonority scale is a hierarchical ranking of speech sounds (or phones).Sonority is loosely defined as the loudness of speech sounds relative to other sounds of the same pitch, length and stress, [1] therefore sonority is often related to rankings for phones to their amplitude. [2]