When 'gh' says 'f': Endnotes Spelling Bee

Following up on the comments on our Spelling video, we explain the phonetics that led some words spelled with a 'gh' to end up making the sound 'f'.

#spelling #language #historyofenglish

Thank you to all our Patreon supporters! Please check out our Patreon

Show notes & credits

Transcript:

As I discussed in the original Spelling video, words spelled with a gh generally correspond to Old English words that had a kind of guttural sound in them, often spelled in Old English with an h or sometimes a g. After the Old English period, the new Norman French scribes decided that using h that way was confusing & so adopted the use of the gh letter combination to spell this very Germanic sound that didn’t exist in French. But over the course of the Middle English period, that guttural sound began to disappear from the English language, so that’s why we have a bunch of words in Modern English, like through & though, in which the gh is silent. Some words that didn’t originally have that guttural sound, like delight & sprightly, began to be spelled as if they did by way of analogy, so delight as if it were related to light. & in some cases that can be useful for distinguishing homonyms such as sleigh & slay. & there a few borrowed words like spaghetti & ghoul in which gh represents another foreign sound. But what about words like laugh, rough, & cough in which the gh is pronounced f like an F-sound?

Well it turns out that there is a kind of connection between consonant sounds produced at the back of the mouth & ones produced with the lips. We already saw that a bit with words like Old English boga becoming Modern English bow. It’s actually a fairly common sound shift that happens in many languages, such as Latin aqua meaning “water” becoming Romanian apa, with the k sound in aqua made at the back of the mouth shifting forward in the mouth to the lips in apa. Similar shifts can be found in other languages such as Irish, Albanian, Russian, & so forth. Well, what happened in the case of words such as laugh & rough is another example of this sound change called labial velar shift. Let me unpack that. Labial means with the lips, so labial sounds include sounds like p spelled p in English. That’s a bilabial stop, that is it’s made by stopping the air flowing from your mouth by putting both lips together. Another labial sound we have is f usually spelled f in English. It’s a labiodental fricative, made by putting your top teeth against your bottom lip & only partially closing off the passage of air, thus causing friction. As for velar sounds, they’re made at the velum or soft palate, that soft part of the roof of your mouth towards the back. So originally words like laugh & rough, pronounced in Old English as hlahhan & ruh had a velar sound, specifically a velar fricative made by partially blocking the air by placing the tongue close to the soft palate. So the sound shift here is from one fricative to another, just moved forward in the mouth. But why did the fricative move all the way forward in the mouth to the lips instead of somewhere closer like further forward on the tongue?

Well there’s good acoustic reasons why a velar fricative would become a labiodental fricative. The friction in both those sounds is well below four thousand cycles per second, whereas for instance the s S-sound, also a fricative, is produced at four thousand cycles per second & above. So velar fricatives & labiodental fricatives sound more similar. Acoustic similarity accounts for other shifts in fricatives too, such as the θ TH-sound in words such as three or through, a dental fricative produced with the tongue & teeth, becoming the labiodental fricative in some dialects of English & being pronounced as fri: & fru:, which is viewer Unknown Ceilings’s preferred pronunciation (somewhere around London I’m guessing?).

Now in some cases, words that underwent this shift became respelled to more accurately represent the sounds, as in the word dwarf, which was dweorg in Old English, & in the case of the word draughtdraft you see both spellings, but for the most part the gh spellings reflecting that older pronunciation became standardized & so we’re stuck with them. The thing is, the changes in pronunciation didn’t happen at the same time in all parts of England nor in the same way, & what we inherited in Modern English is a bit of a mixed bag. So the shift to the f sound was particular to northern dialects, & so we see some Middle English spellings with the letter f in words not pronounced f in Modern English, such as þof for though & þurf for through. & in at least one case, the northern variant persisted, eventually becoming a separate word. Duff, a kind of steamed pudding, was originally just the northern pronunciation of the word dough.