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Th is a digraph in the Latin script. It was originally introduced into Latin to transliterate Greek loan words. In modern languages that use the Latin alphabet, it represents a number of different sounds. It is the most common digraph in order of frequency in the English language. [1]
The most logical use of ⟨th⟩ is to represent a consonant cluster of the phonemes /t/ and /h/, as in English knighthood. This is not a digraph, since a digraph is a pair of letters representing a single phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the separate characters.
The digraph ⟨th⟩ was first introduced in Latin to transliterate the letter theta ⟨Θ, θ⟩ in loans from Greek. Theta was pronounced as an aspirated stop /tʰ/ in Classical and early Koine Greek. [2]
⟨th⟩ is used in academic transcription systems to represent letters in south and east Asian alphabets that have the value /tʰ/. According to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription, for example, ⟨th⟩ represents a series of Thai letters with the value /tʰ/. [3]
⟨th⟩ is also used to transcribe the phoneme /tʰ/ in Southern Bantu languages, such as Zulu and Tswana.
During late antiquity, the Greek phoneme represented by the letter ⟨θ⟩ mutated from an aspirated stop /tʰ/ to a dental fricative /θ/. This mutation affected the pronunciation of ⟨th⟩, which began to be used to represent the phoneme /θ/ in some of the languages that had it.
One of the earliest languages to use the digraph this way was Old High German, before the final phase of the High German consonant shift, in which /θ/ and /ð/ came to be pronounced /d/.
In early Old English of the 7th and 8th centuries, the digraph ⟨th⟩ was used until the Old English Latin alphabet adapted the runic letter ⟨þ⟩ (thorn), as well as ⟨ð⟩ (eth; ðæt in Old English), a modified version of the Latin letter ⟨d⟩, to represent this sound. Later, the digraph reappeared, gradually superseding these letters in Middle English.
In modern English, an example of the ⟨th⟩ digraph pronounced as /θ/ is the one in tooth.
In Old and Middle Irish, ⟨th⟩ was used for /θ/ as well, but the sound eventually changed into [h] (see below).
Other languages that use ⟨th⟩ for /θ/ include Albanian and Welsh, both of which treat it as a distinct letter and alphabetize it between ⟨t⟩ and ⟨u⟩.
English also uses ⟨th⟩ to represent the voiced dental fricative /ð/, as in father. This unusual extension of the digraph to represent a voiced sound is caused by the fact that, in Old English, the sounds /θ/ and /ð/ stood in allophonic relationship to each other and so did not need to be rigorously distinguished in spelling. The letters ⟨þ⟩ and ⟨ð⟩ were used indiscriminately for both sounds, and when these were replaced by ⟨th⟩ in the 15th century, it was likewise used for both sounds. (For the same reason, ⟨s⟩ is used in English for both /s/ and /z/.)
In the Norman dialect Jèrriais, the French phoneme /ʁ/ is realized as /ð/, and is spelled ⟨th⟩ under the influence of English.
In the Latin alphabet for the Javanese language, ⟨th⟩ is used to transcribe the phoneme voiceless retroflex stop ʈ, which is written as ꦛ in the native Javanese script.
Because neither /tʰ/ nor /θ/ were native phonemes in Latin, the Greek sound represented by ⟨th⟩ came to be pronounced /t/. The spelling retained the digraph for etymological reasons. This practice was then borrowed into German, French, Dutch and other languages, where ⟨th⟩ still appears in originally Greek words, but is pronounced /t/. See German orthography. Interlingua also employs this pronunciation.
In early modern times, French, German and English all expanded this by analogy to words for which there is no etymological reason, but for the most part the modern spelling systems have eliminated this. Examples of unetymological ⟨th⟩ in English are the name of the River Thames from Middle English Temese and the name Anthony (though the ⟨th⟩ is often pronounced /θ/ under the influence of the spelling [4] ) from Latin Antonius.
In English, ⟨th⟩ for /t/ can also occur in loan-words from French or German, such as Neanderthal. The English name Thomas has initial /t/ because it was loaned from Norman.
In the transcription of Australian Aboriginal languages ⟨th⟩ represents a dental stop, /t̪/. [5]
In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, ⟨th⟩ represents the lenition of ⟨t⟩. In most cases word-initially, it is pronounced /h/. For example: Irish and Scottish Gaelic toil[tɛlʲ] 'will' → do thoil[dəhɛlʲ] 'your will'.
This use of digraphs with ⟨h⟩ to indicate lenition is distinct from the other uses which derive from Latin. While it is true that the presence of digraphs with ⟨h⟩ in Latin inspired the Goidelic usage, their allocation to phonemes is based entirely on the internal logic of the Goidelic languages. Lenition in Gaelic lettering was traditionally denoted in handwriting using an overdot but typesetters lacked these pre-composed types and substituted a trailing ⟨h⟩. It is also a consequence of their history: the digraph initially, in Old and Middle Irish, designated the phoneme /θ/, but later sound changes complicated and obscured the grapheme–sound correspondence, so that ⟨th⟩ is even found in some words like Scottish Gaelic piuthar 'sister' that never had a /θ/ to begin with. This is an example of "inverted (historical) spelling": the model of words where the original interdental fricative had disappeared between vowels caused ⟨th⟩ to be reinterpreted as a marker of hiatus.
The Irish and Scottish Gaelic lenited /t/ is silent in final position, as in Scottish Gaelic sgith/skiː/ 'tired'. And, rarely, it is silent in initial position, as in Scottish Gaelic thu/uː/ 'you'.
In English, the ⟨th⟩ in asthma and clothes [6] is often silent.
U+1D7AᵺLATIN SMALL LETTER TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH is used for phonetic notation in some dictionaries. [7]
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and [b], pronounced with the lips; and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced throughout the vocal tract;, [v], and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and, which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.
Eth, known as ðæt in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese, and Elfdalian.
H, or h, is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch, or regionally haitch.
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ess, plural esses.
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Greek ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.
Z, or z, is the twenty-sixth and last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed, which is most commonly used in international English and zee, only used in American, sometimes Canadian and Caribbean English and with an occasional archaic variant izzard.
Thorn or þorn is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but it was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.
Welsh orthography uses 29 letters of the Latin script to write native Welsh words as well as established loanwords.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the language's phonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The word alphabet is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. The alphabet originated around the 7th century to write Old English from Latin script. Since then, letters have been added or removed to give the current letters:
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic, is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive written texts. It was used from c. 600 to c. 900. The main contemporary texts are dated c. 700–850; by 900 the language had already transitioned into early Middle Irish. Some Old Irish texts date from the 10th century, although these are presumably copies of texts written at an earlier time. Old Irish is thus forebear to Modern Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician tāw 𐤕, Hebrew tav ת, Aramaic taw 𐡕, Syriac taw ܬ, and Arabic tāʾ ت. In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived letter ث ṯāʾ. Its original sound value is.
In English, the digraph ⟨th⟩ represents in most cases either one or the other of two phonemes: the voiced dental fricative and the voiceless dental fricative. Occasionally, it stands for or the cluster. In compound words, ⟨th⟩ may be a consonant sequence rather than a digraph.
Ch is a digraph in the Latin script. It is treated as a letter of its own in the Chamorro, Old Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Igbo, Uzbek, Quechua, Ladino, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Ukrainian, Japanese, Latynka, and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. Formerly ch was also considered a separate letter for collation purposes in Modern Spanish, Vietnamese, and sometimes in Polish; now the digraph ch in these languages continues to be used, but it is considered as a sequence of letters and sorted as such.
In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop. Although not as typical of sound change as lenition, fortition may occur in prominent positions, such as at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable; as an effect of reducing markedness; or due to morphological leveling.
C, or c, is the third letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is cee, plural cees.
In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft ⟨c⟩ occurs in which ⟨c⟩ represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard ⟨c⟩ often precedes the non-front vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩, and is that of the voiceless velar stop,. The sound of a soft ⟨c⟩, typically before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩, may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft ⟨c⟩ is.
Gh is a digraph found in many languages.