Re: Possible Record for Slow on the Uptake

On Nov 2, 2:59 am, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 1 Nov 2009 23:47:19 -0800 (PST), Butch Malahide

<fred.gal...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 1, 11:59 pm, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Logically, "th" would mean an aspirated "t" (that is, a "t" sound
followed by or including an "h" sound.)  There's no reason for other
languages to care that English uses it to indicate a different sound
entirely.

Do you know of a language where h after t is used to indicate
aspiration, i.e., "t" means unaspirated t and "th" means aspirated t?
I can only think of examples where "t" and "th" are pronounced the
same, either both aspirated (English Tom * Thom) or both unaspirated.

That used to be the distinction in German, but it dropped out of use,
which is why the latest round of spelling reform dropped a lot of H's
-- they don't have a phonetic purpose anymore.

They apparently did indicate aspiration until maybe two hundred years
ago.

I believe there's a distinction in some North Indian languages -- I
don't know whether it's in all of them -- that's reflected in some
transliterations.  (The North Indian family is Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi,
Rajasthani, Marathi, Bengali, and Romany, if I remember correctly.)

It is also worth noting that the [th] sound as used in English is
somewhat rare in world languages. I don't know the history of this
bit of orthography, but given that Old and Middle English used the
thorn and/or the edh for this sound, I wonder if Early Modern English
printers wanted some purely Latin alphabet way of showing this sound
and picked [th] because it wasn't being used for anything else.

Richard R. Hershberger
.

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