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Understanding the "th" Digraph in Languages

The document discusses the use of the digraph "th" to represent various phonemes in different languages. It began as representing the aspirated stop /th/ sound in Greek and Latin, but later came to represent the voiceless fricative /θ/ sound during late antiquity after the Greek phoneme mutated. It is now used for both the /th/ and /θ/ sounds in languages like English, as well as to transcribe similar phonemes in other languages writing systems.

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57 views1 page

Understanding the "th" Digraph in Languages

The document discusses the use of the digraph "th" to represent various phonemes in different languages. It began as representing the aspirated stop /th/ sound in Greek and Latin, but later came to represent the voiceless fricative /θ/ sound during late antiquity after the Greek phoneme mutated. It is now used for both the /th/ and /θ/ sounds in languages like English, as well as to transcribe similar phonemes in other languages writing systems.

Uploaded by

pragyan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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.

Aspirated stop /tʰ/


A. B. Frost's first comic: a German
The digraph ⟨th⟩ was first introduced in
attempts to pronounce English-
Latin to transliterate the letter theta ⟨Θ, language "th" sounds
θ⟩ in loans from Greek. Theta was
pronounced as an aspirated stop /tʰ/ in
Classical and 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.

Voiceless fricative /θ/


During late antiquity, the Greek phoneme represented by the letter ⟨θ⟩ mutated from
an aspirated stop /tʰ/ to a 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.

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