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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 /.
Diagram of the changes in English vowels during the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s [1] (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English.
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same , or they may be pronounced differently (heteronyms, also known as heterophones). Some homographs are nouns or adjectives when the accent is on the first syllable, and verbs when it is on the second.
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 ...
Increasing numbers of Canadians have a feature called "Canadian raising", in which the nucleus of the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are more "raised" before voiceless consonants. Thus for Canadians, word pairs like pouter/powder ([ˈpɐʊɾɚ] versus [ˈpaʊɾɚ]) and rider/writer are pronounced differently.
In early Middle English, before the merger, way and day, which came from Old English weġ and dæġ had /ej/ and /aj/ respectively. Similarly, vein and vain (borrowings from French) were pronounced differently as /vejn/ and /vajn/. After the merger, vein and vain were homophones, and way and day rhymed.
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were once pronounced (the latter is still pronounced in some Scots varieties), but after the loss of their sounds, they no longer represent the word's phonemic structure or its pronunciation.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.
The cot–caught merger is a phonemic merger that occurs in some varieties of English causing the vowel in words like cot, rock, and doll to be pronounced the same as the vowel in the words caught, talk, law, and small. The psalm–sum merger is a phenomenon occurring in Singaporean English where the phonemes /ɑ/ and /ʌ/ are both pronounced /ɑ/.