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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 /.
The soft pronunciation of г occurs before any of the "softening" vowels е ё и ю я ь and the hard pronunciation occurs elsewhere. However, the letter ж functions as a "soft g" in the Romance sense, with alterations between г and ж common in the language (e.g. ложиться, "to lie (down)", past tense лёг; подруга ...
Note: Some of these pronouns may be pronounced differently based on their user. xe/xyr ... and men in positions of power often didn’t take issue with a lack of gender-neutral pronouns, Baron ...
It is also occasionally pronounced [ə], such as in Edinburgh. When gh occurs at the beginning of a word, it is pronounced hard (/ɡ/) as in “ghost” and “ghetto". In a few words of Greek origin, the digraph gm is pronounced /m/, with the (g) being silent, such as in “phlegm”, “paradigm” and "diaphragm".
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 ...
(Touma notes it's pronounced differently in the U.S. and the U.K.) — Shein (SHEE-in): The Chinese fast fashion company at the center of the “Shein haul” trend, in which participants record ...
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were once pronounced (the latter is still pronounced in some Scots varieties), but after the loss of their sounds, they no longer represent the word's phonemic structure or its pronunciation.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.