| Th (digraph) |
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<NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR /TH/ The most obvious use of the letter combination is to represent the juxtaposition of the phonemes /t/ and /h/, as in English ''hothouse''. However, this is not strictly a digraph, as it is representing a consonant cluster rather than a single phoneme. | <NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR As a digraph in the strict sense, was originally introduced in Latin , which had many Greek loan words, to transcribe the Greek letter Theta (<Θ>, <θ>), which at that time originally represented the aspirated stop . | Still today, is used in academic transcription systems to represent letters in oriental alphabets which have the value . According to Royal Thai General System Of Transcription , for example, | represents a series of Thai letters with the value . | <NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR /θ/ A sound shift in Greek in the last two centuries BC resulted in the letter <θ> coming to denote the Voiceless Dental Fricative ( IPA : ). Thus by default, the Latin digraph also came to have this value in Greek loanwords. This was then borrowed into the spelling system of some other languages which had the phoneme , including English. Initially, although Old English was written in the Latin alphabet, it used other originally runic symbols for this sound (although in the Northumbrian dialect the spelling of was used for this very phoneme), but from Middle English times these were replaced by | by analogy with the way Latin represented the same sound of Greek. | Other languages using to represent include Albanian and Welsh , in both of which the digraph is considered a distinct letter, and is found between | <NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR /ð/ The use of the digraph to represent a voiced sound is actually rather surprising, but in English it is used also for the Voiced Dental Fricative /ð/. The reason for this is that in Old English the sounds and [ð stood in an Allophonic relationship to each other and therefore did not need to be distinguished in spelling. | <NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR /T/ Because neither nor were native sounds in Latin, an original <θ> in Greek loanwords soon came to be pronounced in Latin with . They continued to be spelled with in deference to their etymology. This practice was then borrowed into German , French and other languages, where | still appears in Greek loan words, but is pronounced . See German Orthography . Interlingua also employs this pronunciation. | In early modern times, French, German and English all expanded this by analogy to words in which there was no etymological reason for it, but for the most part the modern spelling systems have eliminated this. A rare example of unetymological in English is the name of the River ''Thames''. | In English, for can also occur in loan-words from French or German, such as ''Neanderthal''. | <NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR /H/ In Irish and Scottish Gaelic represents the Lenition of /t/. In word-initial position this is pronounced /h/ in most cases. For example (in both languages), ''toil'' 'will' → ''do thoil'' 'your will'. | This use of digraphs with <NOWIKI><TH></NOWIKI> FOR /Ø/ The Irish and Scottish Gaelic lenited /t/ is silent in medial and final positions. Gaelic ''sgith'' /ski:/ 'tired'. Exceptionally also in initial position (Gaelic ''thu'' /u:/ 'you'). SEE ALSO |
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