Looks like a digraph, but isn't

rolig Btw, I once had a brilliant professor who was Czech. He generally spoke excellent English, but in one lecture at least he kept referring th "haffazard" events (with the stress on the third syllable). I should perhaps have quietly informed him of the correct pronunciation after the lecture, but it was so cute I wanted to start saying it myself. Oct 22, 2009

madmouth in Hindi the 'kh' also stands--ostensibly--for the aspirated k, though one does hear it realized as the velar fricative quite often. Oct 21, 2009

pterodactyl Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm opening up the list to anyone. Dive right in! Oct 21, 2009

rolig In English, kh is a digraph in khan, Kharkov, and Khrushchev, where it conventionally represents the voiceless velar fricative /x/ in other languages, though in English it is usually pronounced as the voiceless velar plosive /k/. Oct 21, 2009

bilby Single character in Arabic. Oct 21, 2009

pterodactyl Milos, I'm with you on hothead and upheaval, but you've lost me with lunkhead and packhorse. Is kh a digraph? Oct 21, 2009

milosrdenstvi hothead; lunkhead; upheaval, packhorse Oct 21, 2009

pterodactyl Oh, now I understand! Theta doesn't represent /θ/, it represents an aspirated /t/... so the "Th" in "Thomas" also represents an aspirated /t/... but English doesn't distinguish between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants, so we pronounce it with a standard English /t/ (which probably gets aspirated anyway, because it's word-initial).

Fascinating. Thanks, rolig! Oct 20, 2009

rolig My guess would be that it came into English via Latin, which took it from Greek (Θωμᾶς), though orginally it's an Aramaic name meaning "twin". In any case, that "h" was part of a digraph representing the Greek letter theta. Oct 20, 2009

pterodactyl Huh, good point. I always interpreted the "h" in "Thomas" as a silent letter, which doesn't represent any phoneme in the word, but it could very well be part of a digraph representing /t/. I suppose that, to resolve this question, we'd have to go into the name's etymology. Oct 20, 2009

rolig Fun list! I would question, however, the inclusion of Thomas, where "Th" is still a digraph (two letters representing one phoneme), just as "ch" is still a digraph in "character". An interesting case is threshold, where "sh" represents "sh + h". Oct 20, 2009

pterodactyl Digraphs are one of the many exceptions to phonetic spelling. I guess that makes these words exceptions to the exceptions? Oct 17, 2008