2686: Letters vs. Digraphs: Which is More Authentic Apr 28, 2024

 English speakers should be pretty used to digraphs and trigraphs: using two or more letters to represent one sound. Think of <SH>, <TH>, <PH> and so on, which is not the same as silent letters, like ‘science’ having a silent C (or S, kind of). One interesting historical trend is that <S> usually represents the sound [s] as opposed [ʃ] (as in <SH>), written in English and French as a digraph (French: <CH>) or in German as a trigraph (i.e. <SCH>).This is not always the case though, as in Hungarian where the letter <S> represents [ʃ] and if you wanted to write [s] that would be spelt <SZ>. This just goes to show that the letters English considers to represent as the default of sorts is not universal, seen again in the difference between <C> and <CH>; the sounds those are generally thought of as representing in English are reversed in many contexts in Italian, e.g. ‘ciao’ (ˈt͡ʃa.o) vs. ‘chiodo’ (ˈkjɔ.do). In fact, in Old English the letter <C> also was [t͡ʃ] (as in <CH>), so really employing a digraph as opposed to one letter is more of a historical coincidence than anything else.