1422: hebrew and the letter h Nov 2, 2018

It is argued that there are no irreligious words that have come to English directly from Hebrew. This is because of geographic distance, but also because for most of Hebrew's history, nothing that could be called English today existed. These factors combined mean that any few words there are usually went through languages like Greek first. Interestingly, neither word for 'Hebrew' in Old French—the language from which the English word was directly loaned—or the original Hebrew '‘iḇrî' had the [h]; most French words don't allow this anyway, but 'Ebreu' wasn't even spelt with one. Nevertheless, both the late Greek and modern English words, relevantly, do. There isn't a specific reason for this—there never really would be—but it could just have been a switch from a glottal stop to an [h], which isn't historically uncommon.