Buzz
It's a conundrum, a challenging puzzle, enough to make you either want to fight or chuckle. The 'gh' in English has a variety of pronunciations—or even no pronunciation at all—that seem unrelated to the expected 'g' or 'h' sounds. But why is it there in the first place?
Once upon a time, the 'gh' represented a specific sound, one that's no longer a part of modern English—except perhaps in expressions of disdain like blech. This throaty fricative (represented as /x/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet) exists in German, where you can often find a corresponding sound in English words containing 'gh': light...licht, night...nacht, eight...acht, high...hoch, neighbor...nachbar, though...doch.
So, when you encounter 'gh,' it often signifies that it was once pronounced with the blech sound in Old English, at a time when our written language was being formed. Early scribes had to adjust the Roman alphabet for English, and since Latin lacked the /x/ sound, they used 'h' or a special non-Roman symbol known as yogh (ȝ). Over time, during the Middle English era, 'gh' became the standard.
By that time, the pronunciation had already begun to shift. The sound transformed into /f/ or was dropped altogether. The Great Vowel Shift was in progress, and many aspects of the language were changing. However, by the end of the shift, the printing press had solidified the written system, and the 'gh,' harking back to earlier English, was firmly entrenched.
Not every instance of 'gh' in English traces back to the /x/ sound. The 'gh' at the start of words like ghost and ghoul originates from the practices of Flemish typesetters. Words borrowed from Italian, such as spaghetti and ghetto, simply retained their original Italian spellings.
Some words reveal how 'gh' developed its own identity in English—words that entered the language long after Old English and never included the /x/ sound. For example, delight and sprightly were influenced by words like light and right. The word sleigh was fashioned to resemble weigh, likely to distinguish it from slay. Haughty was shaped after words like taught and aught, because, well, doesn’t that look more dignified than hawty? Whether you like it or not, 'aught' now carries a specific pronunciation with a rounded vowel, and it can't really be spelled any other way (at least in dialects without the caught-cot merger). Is 'taught' the same as 'tot' or 'tawt'? I believe it's 'naught'.
