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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).
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 /.
For example, both the k and the digraph gh of English knight were once pronounced (the latter is still pronounced in some Scots varieties), but after the loss of their sounds, they no longer represent the word's phonemic structure or its pronunciation. Spelling may represent the pronunciation of a different dialect from the one being considered.
Note: Some of these pronouns may be pronounced differently based on their user. xe/xyr (commonly pronounced zee/zeer) I asked xyr to come to the movies. Xe said yes! ze/zir or ze/hir (commonly ...
The letters nge , when final, represent /ndʒ/, as in orange; when not final their pronunciation varies according to the word's etymology (e.g. /ndʒ/ in danger, /ŋg/ in anger, /ŋ/ in banger). In most cases, gg represents /g/ as in dagger, but it may also represent /dʒ/ as in suggest and exaggerate.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
This Latin alphabet was then forced to come up with a symbol to represent the sound of the “w.” According to GrammarPhobia, this 7th-century problem was remedied by the symbol “uu,” which ...
These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same). Excluded are the numerous spellings which fail to make the pronunciation obvious without actually being at odds with convention: for example, the pronunciation / s k ə ˈ n ɛ k t ə d i / [ 1 ] [ 2 ] of ...