Why is gh inconsistent with etymology

Any help or tips for pronouncing these sounds and their etymology and why they have or have not changed which is suitable for a 16 year old girl would be greatly appreciated. I have some experience with this type of work, but not enough to necessarily know best practices. Using this webpage as an example, the general rules that are taught are:.

As per this ELL. Obviously, the rule for gh is inconsistent and particularly problematic, and even a child by third grade will know exceptions like high and though. With gh , I would possibly work with rimes.

I would recommend for an exercise of building up word meaningful word combinations of "gn" and "gh" using the student's own effort and make a conscious effort to remember how every word is pronounced.

That way it would be much more useful to internalize the patterns than to memorize rules Memorizing rules, in my own experience makes the conversation and writing a bit mechanical or robotic and it slows you down but by this method it would be fine.

For a start here's an example "A companion of ours did sign with one of their signatures a letter that has been stuck up in a high bough in a foreign land" translated to French, some English words have Romance roots "A companion of ours did sign with one of their signatures a letter that has been stuck up in a high bough in a foreign land". Try reading it with her it is in English and that might give her a feel of a connection between the "words" of Romance languages and also English.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Problems teaching the 'gn' and 'gh' to an English learner Ask Question. Asked 1 year, 1 month ago.

Active 11 months ago. Viewed 98 times. To try to see if there were any regular patterns, I divided the words into several "classes" based on how they are pronounced. Be aware that the historical forms I list are not comprehensive. Normally, this developed to an "oo" sound as in goose , but it seems to have followed a different path in these words. I found that several authors say for this reason that these forms actually derive from Old English forms with g rather than with [x] Wyld That is, the final h or g was replaced with the semivowel w , which subsequently developed into an oaw sound.

One dialectal pronunciation is discussed further down. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following explanation:. The Norse form gradually gained over [the Old English forms], which disappeared from literature before In Scotl. However, there are not enough ough words with this pronunciation in Modern English to say if the development was "regular" or not.

However, the pronunciation might have been altered by analogy rather than by a sound change. I think it's because old and middle English had a lot of cases and articles and so different word endings. As the language simplified a lot of these were lost leaving the words with a single simplified spelling but kept the original pronunciation. Others were victims of the great vowel shift. So in Chaucer drought is pronounced something like drock-eh-ta but gradually simplified to the current pronunciation while keeping the original spelling.

A comparison between English and German can at least give an idea why in English we have an almost uniform spelling but different pronunciations. English spelling shows the origin of words with the silent letters gh.

But the different vowels before gh led to different pronunciations. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why does the ending -ough have six pronunciations? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 4 months ago.

Eventually, during the Middle English period, they settled on "gh. By that time the pronunciation was already changing. The Great Vowel Shift was underway and many parts of the language were in flux, but by the time the shift was complete, the printing press had stabilized the writing system, and the "gh," pointing back to an earlier English, was here to stay. The word-initial "gh" of ghost and ghoul came from the habits of Flemish typesetters.

Words borrowed from Italian like spaghetti and ghetto just stuck with Italian spelling conventions.