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Ich-lautThe name ich-Laut signifies the final sound of German ich, the voiceless palatal fricative. It is distinguished from the ach-Laut or voiceless velar fricative. In German those two sounds are allophones and both represented by ch. The digraph ch is pronounced in German as an unvoiced velar fricative (IPA /x/) after a, o, u, or au, and as unvoiced palatal fricative (IPA /ç/) elsewhere. This allophonic distribution, whereby an original /x/ gets to be pronounced as /ç/ mainly after front vowels, is a common one, and can be heard also in Scottish, in the pronunciation of light. However, it is by no means inevitable: Dutch, many Southern German dialects, as well as Yiddish, which comes from one of them, retain /x/ in all positions. It is thus reasonable to assume that Old High German ih, the ancestor of modern ich, was pronounced with /x/ rather than /ç/. And it is therefore impossible to tell whether Old English words such as niht (modern night) were pronounced with /x/ or /ç/.
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