2709: Why HW- flipped to WH- May 21, 2024

While it is still found in a few dialects of English, the pronunciation of “wh-” [ʍ] as separate from “w-” [w], in most cases “whale” and “wail” have merged to be indistinguishable. Like many other modern features of English and even Middle English, the source of the change was at least heavily influenced by the Norman conquerors. Beyond simply the pronunciation, however, is the fact that the spelling used to be HW-, as in hwæl (“whale”), as seen in the very first line of Beowulf:

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

(So! We, in the glory of days past of the Spear-Danes, kingly men, how these warriors performed acts of courage.)

Yet now, there is no H+consonant combination in English anymore. This is due to the Norman scribes, who chose to write it WH-, likely in keeping with other spelling norms wherein H signifies a separate sound, like TH, SH, CH, PH or historically GH. While it may be more intuitive to have the H first in some ways to represent this sound, keep in mind the means to aspirate the air to pronounce[ʍ] is not actually two separate consonants, but one unique one, just as with TH or SH and the rest really.

2513: I Longum: ꟾ Oct 29, 2021

Latin vowels used to be written with apexes, which looked more like traditional accent mark than the macrons used for writing out long vowels in Latin today. This was the only form of punctuation, if it can even be called that, sine historically Latin had no lower-case, no spaces words or breaks for sentences. The only other variable in this system was 'i longum' or 'long i', written as ꟾ which represented the long vowel but didn't take the accent mark. While it is true that J developed from I, it is more accurate to say that J developed from ꟾ. Moreover, in Latin orthography, if two i's would be written together, the second would be ꟾ to distinguish it from N or even U (V). Likewise, in Dutch, there is a common digraph for the long [iː] sound written as IJ, and often further stylized with a smaller i in front, sometimes written as Y, though the Y was not related historically.

2509: No 'Loue' Lost: The Break-Vp of U&V Oct 25, 2021

The distinction of U and V as it is now was neither invented nor random, but even into the 16th century, there was not a clear distinction between V and U. Often, V was used in either case if it would fall at the beginning of a word, and in the middle or end of a word, it would be a U, regardless of sound. This discernment between U and V as a phonetic marker happened starting during the renaissance, since Germanic languages and even modern Romance languages have this sounds distinct, but the process was not immediate. This is also, in part, why many words have a so-called silent E at the end, as it helped with disambiguation when the sound was [v] as in 'love' but not 'low' (or 'lou', especially before W came on the scene).

2491: republic Oct 7, 2021

There is a prefix 're-' used either for repetition ('reshape'), negation ('react'), or intensity ('resound'), and while 'public' is a word 'republic' fits none of those above categories. This is because it comes from a Latin phrase, effectively a compound from 'rēpūblicā', the ablative form of 'rēspūblica'—the nominative [subject] form—meaning 'matter/thing of the people'. The loss of -S- is because 'rēspūblica' is two words, which are both being declined separately, and the -S- of 'rēs' (thing) doesn't appear in the form borrowed into other languages.

2464: C-K-Q were Redundant, Even in Ancient Times Sep 10, 2021

In English C, K, and Q may seem redundant together, but this is not actually new. Etruscan used C before front vowels, K before the vowel [a], and Q before back vowels. Effectively, this would be as if English used two different letters for the T in 'tail' as compared to 'trail', which also changes due to the linguistic environment. These Etruscan letters were therefore not phonemic—the sounds, if theoretically used in each other's places would not have changed the meaning of any word—and were in that sense basically redundant even back then. In Etruscan this may have been phonologically redundant, but there is a very minor, allophonic change that happens going from [ki] to [ka] to [ku] in where the consonant is pronounced in one's mouth. You can try this out yourself.

In Latin, which inherited these letters but did not distinguish between back and front vowels in its spelling, this redundancy was present, and some writers commented on it at the time even. Eventually C morphed into a fricative before E and I, like how it is found in Spanish or Italian today. This therefore made the letter K relevant to distinguish when one wanted to indicate the [k] sound in any context, but still it was not terribly useful.