Did you ever wonder why we spell some words in English in ways which bear no resemblance to the way they are pronounced, for example:

(1)	laugh		sigh		sight
	enough		nigh		night
	rough		thigh		height
	tough		high		right
	cough		sleigh		light

Remember Bernard Shaw's word ghoti with the gh from laugh, the o from women and the ti from nation and pronounced 'fish'? Would you believe after that, that the distribution of the two pronunciations of gh in English is amazingly regular? See if you can figure out the rule. The gh was originally pronounced like the ch in Scottish loch 'lake' or German lachen 'laugh' (like you're clearing your throat). In phonetic script, the symbolic alphabet for accurately representing sounds rather than letters, the sound is symbolized as [x] (where the brackets indicate that we are using phonetic script, not the regular alphabet). The preceding u represented lip-rounding (watch yourself pronounce the sound [u] in the mirror--what happens to your lips) which was pronounced simultaneously with gh. When the gh disappeared because it is so softly pronounced, lip-rounding changed to lip-biting (check where your teeth are when you pronounce [v] or [f]. So gh ended up pronounced [f] because of the disappearance of a softly pronounced consonant and a shift of lip activity.

However, gh did not develop into [f] everywhere. To detect the word position in which it did, compare the following examples with those in (1) above. If you still aren't sure of the answer, click here.

(2)	bought		sought		caught		daughter
	fought		ought		taught		slaughter

In fact, the original sound [x] represented by gh in English is the same as the [x] sound in Germanic languages from which English and other Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian) historically developed. Take a look at the following words from German, where the sound is usually represented by ch. The sound goes back to an even older stage when it was pronounced k. To see this, compare the Germanic words in English with related words borrowed from Latin. The stems in the Latin words were originally the same stems in Indo-European as those in the Germanic words.

(3)	ENGLISH	GERMAN	LATIN
	eight	acht	octopus [oktopus]
	fight	fechten	infect [infekt]
	right	Recht	rectify [rektify]
	high	hoch

By the way, the change of k to German ch followed the same Grimm's Law that gave us Germanic f from Indo-European p and th from t.

The branch of linguistics dealing with sounds and sound changes is phonology. If you figured out the rules explaining the examples above, you might be interested in other aspects of how your brain and tongue are wired together -- and how they are wired to the heads of ancestors going back to the Dnepr valley 5,000 years ago. Remember the magic word: LINGUISTICS. It doesn't mean speaking a lot of languages. And it may be the newest science.

Bucknell

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