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In English, we have many words ending in or containing “gh”, but in some cases, the two letters are silent, while in others, it is pronounced as “f” . We have the words tough, rough, and draught, which pronounce "gh" as an "f" sound, while the words height, weight, through, drought, and many others do not pronounce the sound at all.

Are there any rules governing the pronunciations of these words? Or is the reason for this based in the origins of the words?

Edit: My question focuses specifically on the “gh” combination, not the pronunciation of “ough”. In my examples I gave words such as the words height and weight which contain “eigh”, not just words with “ough”.

Decapitated Soul
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Naomi
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    Yes, origins are a good guide for this one. – Lawrence Jul 06 '20 at 15:02
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    I'd be surprised if there is a rule, as there are relatively recent local pronunciations in England where most "gh" combinations are said as "ff" (e.g. 'siff' for 'sigh'). There's also the places Keighley (keethley) and Lough Neagh (loch nay) to contend with. – Phil M Jones Jul 06 '20 at 15:02
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    @Phil: in what region is sigh pronounced as siff? – herisson Jul 06 '20 at 17:16
  • @PhilMJones why do you think "siff" for "sigh" is recent? – phoog Jul 06 '20 at 19:01
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    'f' isn't the only way gh is pronounced. Not that you can consider it or any combination of letters to necessarily be the thing that "has" some sound that is part of the sound of a word or phrase. – philipxy Jul 07 '20 at 03:19
  • @phoog Ah, what I meant was that it had continued until relatively recently. Apologies for lack of clarity. See my answer on this question: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/525773/u-k-regional-anomaly-in-pronouncing-ought – Phil M Jones Jul 07 '20 at 10:35
  • Reminds me of the joke where, if you use pronunciations of letter combinations taken from certain words, then you can claim that "ghoti" should be pronounced [fish] – Kevin Jul 07 '20 at 13:54
  • Related. – tchrist Oct 23 '22 at 16:51

1 Answers1

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The question as posed has no answer, because it starts from an incorrect assumption.
Modern English has no "gh" sound. Middle English had one, but it was lost.

What that means is that the sounds changed, but the spelling didn't, since the spelling got fixed before the Early Modern English period (roughly, 1600-1800; after 1800 is Modern English). When a big sound change is happening, different things happen in different dialects, and then they all merge together, with different words coming from different dialects that made different changes.

While the [x] allophone of the ME /h/ phoneme (which was spelled "gh" in ME) was being lost, people started hearing [x] as a different voiceless fricative (like /f/ or /θ/ -- there are dialects of English still where trough is pronounced like troth instead of troff), or else they just stopped hearing it at all, so it was gone in the next generation's speech. But the spelling remained, to encourage people to question it.

John Lawler
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    Why the downvote? – user888379 Jul 06 '20 at 15:44
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    @user888379 it's interesting, but it stops short of actually providing a useful answer. – hobbs Jul 06 '20 at 23:39
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    Feel free to make on up yourself, then. What are the rules for pronouncing the gh sound? – John Lawler Jul 07 '20 at 00:02
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    @JohnLawler We're just ghoting for some sort of guideline! – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- Jul 07 '20 at 01:56
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    @chrylis-cautiouslyoptimistic- You'll be waiting a long time. Look at the name of the English town Loughborough (which is pronounced "Luffburrow"). If you can work out a rule which will tell you how to pronounce that you're doing better than I can. – BoldBen Jul 07 '20 at 03:59
  • @BoldBen My comment was primarily a joke, though bizarrely enough, my first guess of pronunciation of Loughbourough was "Loffburrow". – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- Jul 07 '20 at 06:02
  • @chrylis-cautiouslyoptimistic- We can guess that because we already know borough is read "burrow", but figuring out a rule that can predict rough is read as /f/ while borough is silent will be a challenge indeed. – lambshaanxy Jul 07 '20 at 07:28
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    "borough" isn't read as "burrow", it's read as "bruh", only one syllable and with a reduced vowel. This is pretty common across British toponyms (and one reason why Americans stand out a lot when talking about the capital of Scotland) – Tristan Jul 07 '20 at 09:37
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    @BoldBen As Tristan says, the locals pronounce it "Lufbra". In fact, many organisations in the town (including at the University) use that spelling as a nickname. (It's similar "Borough" on its own, as an administrative district, which would be "burrah" in most of the UK, not "Burrow" as it would in the USA) – Chronocidal Jul 07 '20 at 12:18
  • @Chronocidal Burrah is possibly a better representation of the sound, however I have a predominently Derbyshire accent and so I tend to pronounce "burrow" as people with RP and many other accents would pronounce "burrah". It's a bit like the RP and southern representation of "up north" as "oop north" and the northern representation of "down south" as "dayn sayth" or "dahn sarf". The people with the northern, 'posh' and estuary accents spell the words normally and find the representations of their own pronunciations odd. This only strengthens my point about the pronunciation of 'gh' though. – BoldBen Jul 08 '20 at 06:49
  • @lambshaanxy dunno call it rag or coarse cloth (or bombclat). Live is rough these days, we can be so happy. It may be difficult to believe that's where great is from (grit) but it is. Actually German grob "rough" has a cognate in English gruff, how about that, and probably not from gh (given they could mostly not write). More over, English has lost hundreds of g- in words like enough, yearn, yawn. So, ya had a'ruff day? – vectory Oct 24 '22 at 21:21