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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: TO MiquelC USING H
In-Reply-To: jvaux@metz.une.edu.au's message of 18 Oct 1994 05:05:04 GMT
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References: <37vl20$bru@grivel.une.edu.au>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 1994 21:06:27 GMT
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In article <37vl20$bru@grivel.une.edu.au> jvaux@metz.une.edu.au (Julie Vaux)
writes:

>And does anyone have comments on the tradition of using h in digraphs to
>represent fricatives - on the history of this etc?

>I know one of the reasons is the evolution of fricatives from voiced
>consonants but apart from this ???

What would that have to do with it?

The source of this tendency is in Latin borrowing from Greek:  Early borrowings
of words with voiceless aspirates (theta, phi, and khi) spelled these foreign
sounds with the corresponding voiceless unaspirated stop plus <h>.  Later
borrowings, after the development of the voiceless aspirates to voiceless
fricatives, use <f> for phi, but continue to use the orthographic clusters <th>
and <ch> for theta and khi respectively because these sounds were not otherwise
representable in Latin orthography.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
