[XeTeX] Off topic (interesting) question

Yannis Haralambous yannis1962 at gmail.com
Sat Aug 20 19:53:14 CEST 2022


As illustrated by Coulmas, there is no causal relation between the presence of the phoneme /h/ and the one of the grapheme <h>:

Consider, for instance, Latin-derived words such as habit, heretic, hotel and hospital in English where the initial <h> is pronounced, although it had already ceased to be pronounced in Middle French whence these words were borrowed. Some frequently used words like hour are still pronounced without the /h/, despite the spelling. But the others are evidence that writing had become an agent of linguistic change, transcending its role as a means of expression. The image became the model.

(quote from F. Coulmas, "Writing Systems", CUP, 2003)

"History" may very well be one of these words which were pronounced without the /h/ phoneme in Middle French when passed over to English, and then re-acquired the /h/ phoneme because of their spelling. So much for the Saussurean primacy of spoken language…

> Le 20 août 2022 à 11:47, Jens Bakker <jbakker at jbakker.de> a écrit :
> 
> May be, this is a misunderstanding by some teachers who do pronounce it „istory“ or a joke by some students, in English this word is pronounced with an „h“, and therefore it seems to be impossible to write it without an „h“ but to pronounce it with an „h“ at the beginning of the word, according to the customs of English orthography.

 <http://www.imt-atlantique.fr/>	Yannis HARALAMBOUS
Professor
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UMR CNRS 6285 Lab-STICC
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‌I recall a workshop in which Pat Hayes proposed a fine of $1000
for every researcher who invents a new logic.
‌(Murray Shanahan, ‌Solving the frame problem)‌

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