The Story of th

The last of the Latin h-containing digraphs is <th>. As we said earlier, <TH> is how the Romans transliterated  the Greek letter  <Θ θ> (theta), which in classical Greek was what’s known as an aspirated t, [t^h] in IPA, much like the <t> in English top (which is somewhat different  from the unaspirated <t>in stop).

That is how the Greek poet Homer would have pronounced that letter in 850BC but, just like the other two aspirated sounds in Classical Greek, by 2,000 years ago, the time of Koine Greek, the language the Christian bible was written in, this Greek letter had changed its pronunciation. Now it was pronounced like the <th> in English thumb (the IPA symbol is [θ]), which is the same sound as Castilian Spanish <z> in zapato “shoe”, for instance.

This was a sound that actually did exist in Old English and Old English had a letter of its very own to represent this sound, namely the letter <þ> (thorn). But when Normans took over England in 1066, they replaced that letter with the <th> digraph. Other native English letters were replaced as well: the letter <ð> (eth), which represented the sound in English then and clothes, was also replaced by the very same <th>.  Most European languages, which did not have the [θ] sound, pronounced the <th> of Latinized Greek words, such as English word theatre (which English got from French) as a regular <t>, which is how it is pronounced in modern French théâtre or Spanish teatro.

That is why <th> in English typically represents the sound [θ], as in theater, or the sound [ð] in these. In English <th> is only pronounced [t] in a few cases, namely a few words, mostly proper names, such as Esther, Thomas, Thames, and thyme.

Castilian Spanish does have the [θ] sound, spelled <z> or <c>, as we have seen, but this is quite a recent development in the history of Spanish and Spanish also pronounced Latin <th> from Greek <θ> (theta) the same as <t>, that is [t] and not [θ]. In a 19th century spelling reform, Spanish removed all the (unpronounced) h’s from words like theatro “theater”, leaving them as teatro. The same thing happened with words with <ch>, so that the word for character in Spanish is now written  carácter. Words that had <ph> on the other hand, had that digraph replaced by the letter <f>, so that in Spanish photograph is fotografía and phenomenon is fenómeno.

Greek letters in English

We could not finish this story about the influence of Latin and Greek on English spelling without mentioning the three Greek letters in the English alphabet. We have already mentioned <k>, which was introduced when the letter <c> changed sounds in some contexts in order to avoid ambiguities. The other two letters are <y> and <z>.

The letter <y> in English can be either a consonant sound, as in yes or yoghurt, or a vowel sound, as in happy or myth. How did this letter come into English? As you may have guessed the story takes us back to Latin and the Romans. The Latin vowels were five: A, E, I, O and U. But Greek had another vowel sound. The vowels in Classical Greek were <Α α> ([a]), Ε ε ([e]), <Η η> (long [ē] in Classical Greek), <Ι ι> ([i] in Classical Greek), Ο ο ([o] in Classical Greek), <Ω ω> (long [ō] in Classical Greek), and <Υ υ> ([u] in Classical Greek).

This last vowel, the letter <Υ υ>, which was pronounced [u], the sound of the vowel in boot or soup in Classical Greek times, changed its pronunciation in the prestigious dialect of Attica from [u] to a sound like French <u>, as in tu “you”, or German <ü>, as in Mütze “cap”, a sound which in IPA is written [y], at the time of contact with the Romans more than 2,000 years ago. This was a sound that Latin didn’t have, so when they borrowed Greek words that had this sound, they borrowed the letter too (the upper case one, since the Romans, did not use lower case letters, only upper case).  (Do note that the Latin letter <U> originally derives from Classical Greek <Y>, borrowed hundreds of years earlier.)

Since Latin didn’t have this sound, only upper class Romans who spoke Greek actually pronounced it like the Greeks did, and most people pronounced like a regular <i>, which in Latin, like in Spanish, had the sound [i], as in meat, beet, machine, and Pete, or sometimes <u>, which in Latin, like Spanish, had the sound [u], as in boot and soup. (French <u>, IPA [y], is a mixture of the two sounds, [i] and [u]: the tongue is positioned just like for the [i], but the lips are positioned just like for the [u], that is, pursed or ‘rounded’.)

It turns out that Old English (more than 1,000 years ago) had the sound of Attic <Y> or modern French <u> too, and so it borrowed the Greek letter <y> to represent it. By the time of Middle English, hundreds of years later, English had lost that sound, which had changed to the same sound as the letter <i>, short or long versions: [ɪ] or [i]), which wasn’t the same sound it has now, since English long vowels changed their pronunciation a great deal at the end of the Middle English period, about 500 years ago.

In Modern English, vocalic <y> is still used for the sound [i] at many non-Greek words the end of a word, as in happy or city (but, note the plural cities, without a <y>), and for the sound of the diphthong [aɪ] at the end of a word or a word stem as in my, spy, and dying. The rest of vocalic y’s are in Greek words which English borrowed from Latin, such as myth, hygiene, hyper, or system, and style, typically representing one of the two vowel sounds [ɪ] or [aɪ], respectively (the [aɪ] diphthongs being the modern equivalent of Middle English [i]). (Do note that not all Greek loanwords in English came through Latin; a good number of them are typically compound words that were created from Greek elements relatively recently, such as anthropology, epistemology.)

The English letter <y> can also represent a consonantal sound, the sound in words like yell, year and yoghurt, which is represented in IPA by the symbol [j]. It seems that the letter <y> may have been  introduced to replace the Old English letter yogh <Ȝȝ> where it represented that same sound [j]. (The Old English letter <Ȝȝ> was also used to represent another sounds too.)

In Spanish, by the way, the letter <y> used to have a vocalic use, representing the same sound as the letter , namely [i], but in 1792 the Spanish Academy decided that only the letter <i> would have a vocalic sound, except in the conjunction y “and”. The <y> other than that, Spanish only has consonantal use, as in yema “yolk, bud” (from Latin gemma), and an use representing the semivocalic version of the vowel [i] in diphthongs when they come at the end of a word, as in rey “king” (cf. reina “queen”, with exactly the same sound).

Finally, let’s take a look at the English letter <z>. The Greek letter < Ζ ζ >, which originally probably represented the sound [ʣ], a mixture of the sounds [d] and [z] which doesn’t exist in Latin or in English, and later the sound [z], the same as the English letter <z> in zoo. As in the case of the letter <Y>, Latin borrowed <Z> to write Greek loanwords that had that letter in the first century BCE, after Rome conquered Greece, words such as ZONA, meaning “belt” but also “zone”, and ZODIACUS “zodiac”.

The Romance languages stemmed from popular spoken Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400’s. By about 500 years later the different ways of speaking Latin throughout the western part of the former Empire had developed into different languages in France (including the precursor of modern French), the Iberian Peninsula (including the precursors of modern Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician), etc. And these languages had developed new sounds that didn’t exist in Latin, among them [z] and [ʣ]. Thus the letter <z> came in handy in these cases. French used it and through French influence it came into English, which also had the sound [z]. That sound had been spelled <s> before then and it has continued to be so spelled to this day, as in the words thousand or was. Some native words use <z> in English nowadays, such as frozen, squeeze or sneeze, but most English words with a <z> are probably of Greek origin, such as zeal, or sometimes Arabic, as in magazine.

Spanish used the letter <z> for the new sound [ʣ], as in fazer “to do” (hacer in Modern Spanish). When that sound disappeared around the 17th century, the letter came to signify the sound that [ʣ] morphed to, namely [θ] in Castilian Spanish and [s] in all other varieties of Spanish, but typically only before the vowels <a>, <o>, and <u>. Before <e> and <i> Spanish now writes that sound with the letter <c> (as we saw in hacer above).