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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 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 ...
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".
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 /.
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 ...
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were once pronounced (the latter is still pronounced in some Scots varieties), but after the loss of their sounds, they no longer represent the word's phonemic structure or its pronunciation.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.
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.
The following pronunciation respelling key is used in some Wikipedia articles to respell the pronunciations of English words. It does not use special symbols or diacritics apart from the schwa (ə), which is used for the first sound in the word "about". See documentation for {} for examples and instructions on using the template.