I tried doing a search here but didn’t find what I wanted… an English-major friend once told me that there were nine ways in English to write the letter ‘F’, but we could only come up with three:
f
ph (telephone)
gh (laugh, draught)
Any English majors or linguists out there that can name the other 6, if there are that many?
umm…i think there maybe some misremembering going on here.
there’s nine ways to pronounce “ough.”
as in:
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed, houghed, and hiccoughed.
One can also add “ough” as in the Irish “lough.”
But for nine ways to write “f”, I don’t think so.
F, f, F, [sub]F[/sub], F, F, f, f, F, F, f, F, [sub]F[/sub], F, F, f, f, F, F, f, F, [sub]F[/sub], F, F, f, f, F, F
I can think of several others: pf (pfennig); lf (half, calf); v (have, as in “Do I have to?”) and ff (many examples).