Re: THEORY: derivation question

FFlores wrote:
> What happened with "gh" in English? It's always puzzled me
> to have a digraph that is silent sometimes and a fricative
> some other times. After such patterns as seek > sought,
> think > tought, I'd say that (besides Ablaut) a final /kt/
> became /xt/ (<ght>) and then /x/ lengthened the previous
> vowel and disappeared, maybe becoming /h/ at some point.
> This could explain the long vowel in light, might, etc.
> But where does the /f/ come from? Is it that final /xt/
> becomes /:t/, but /x.t/ (in different syllables as in laughter)
> becomes /f.t/, with /x/ shifting from velar to labiodental?
Well, the <gh> came from the Normans.  In Old English it was written
<h>, e.g., <riht>.  This indicated /x/, thus /riht/, or something like
that.  The Normans wrote it as <gh>.

I don't know about the /f/ and /h/.  I don't know about words like
"laugh", if it had been interdental, /lOxa/, or whatever the vowels
were, surely there would've been voicing.  But perhaps it was dialectal
variations?

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