 Welcome to the End Note Spelling Bee. In this mini-series, I'm following up on the question I asked in my video about spelling. What are your favorite spelling pet peeves? A number of viewers, including Adam van der Plum V, Rue Rose, and Unknown Ceilings, had a further discussion about the dreaded G-H spellings in English. As I discussed in the original spelling video, words spelled with a G-H 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, and so adopted the use of the G-H 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 and though, in which the G-H is silent. Some words that didn't originally have that guttural sound, like delight and sprightly, began to be spelled as if they did by way of analogy. So delight as if it were related to light, and in some cases, that can be useful for distinguishing homonyms, such as sleigh and sleigh. And there are a few borrowed words, like spaghetti and ghoul, in which G-H represents another foreign sound. But what about words like laugh, ruff, and cough, in which the G-H is pronounced as an F sound? Well, it turns out that there is a kind of connection between consonant sounds produced at the back of the mouth, and ones produced with the lips. We already saw that a bit with words like old English boha, 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 c 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, and so forth. Well, what happened in the case of words such as laugh and ruff is another example of this sound change, called labial veal or shift. Let me unpack that a bit. Labial means with the lips, so labial sounds include sounds like p, spelled p in English. That's a bilabial stop. It 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 and only partially closing off the passage of air, thus causing friction. As for vealor sounds, they're made at the vealum or soft palate, that soft part of the roof of your mouth toward the back. So originally, words like laugh and ruff, pronounced in Old English as rachan and ruch, had a vealor sound, specifically a vealor 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 move 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 vealor fricative would become a labiodental fricative. The friction in both those sounds is well below 4,000 cycles per second, whereas, for instance, the s sound, also a fricative, is produced at 4,000 cycles per second and above. So vealor fricatives and labiodental fricatives sound more similar. Acoustic similarity accounts for other shifts in fricatives too, such as the ththth sound in words such as thre or thru, a dental fricative produced with the tongue and teeth, becoming the labiodental fricative in some dialects of English, and being pronounced as frie and fru, which is viewer unknown ceiling's preferred pronunciation, somewhere around London I'm guessing. Now in some cases, words that underwent this shift became re-spelled to more accurately represent the sounds, as in the word dwarf, which was dwerch in Old English. And in the case of the word draught, you see both spellings. But for the most part, the gh spellings reflecting that older pronunciation became standardized and so were 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. And 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, and so we see some middle English spellings with the letter f in words not pronounced f in modern English, such as thofe, though, and thoef, through. And in at least one case, the northern variant persisted, eventually becoming a separate word. Duff, a kind of steamed pudding, was originally the northern pronunciation of the word dough. Oh, and you know how the word hiccup is sometimes spelled with a gh? That just comes from the false etymological connection with the word cough. Hiccup was always pronounced with the p sound at the end. I'll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more spelling b videos intermittently for the next while in between other main videos. Thanks for all the responses, and as always, you can hear even more etymology and history as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people on the endless knot podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching.