What was the historical pronunciation of the digraph <gh>, as in height, thought, thorough, laugh, enough, Edinburgh like?
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From wikipedia:
In the dominant dialects of modern English, ⟨gh⟩ is almost always either silent or pronounced /f/ (see ough). It is thought that before disappearing, the sound became partially or completely voiced to [ɣx] or [ɣ], which would explain the new spelling - Old English used a simple ⟨h⟩ - and the diphthongization of any preceding vowel.
It is also occasionally pronounced [ə], such as in Edinburgh.
The follwing extract from Quora makes some interesting points:
English has a funny relation to its "gh" digraph. It inherits it from the Germanic languages, where it's pronounced as a rasp in the back of the throat (the "voiceless velar fricative"). In modern German it's spelled with a "ch" as in "Bach".
It was pronounced that way in Old English and continued that way into Middle English. Chaucer would have pronounced "knight" as the Germans pronounce it today, "knecht", with the "k" sounded.
