By Anatoly Liberman
Because of the frequency of the words the, this, that, these, those, them, their, there, then, and with, the letter h probably occurs in our texts more often than any other (for Shakespeare’s epoch thee and thou should have been added). But then of course we have think, three, though, through, thousand, and words with ch, sh, ph, and gh. Despite the prominence of h in written English its status is entirely undeserved, because it performs its most important historical task, namely to designate the sound in words like have, hire, home, and so forth only in word and morpheme initial position (the latter as in rehire, dehydrated, and the like).
The history of h is dramatic. Germanic experienced a change known as the First Consonant Shift (a big shock, as the capitalization above shows). When we compare Latin quod “what” (pronounced kwod) and its Old English cognate hwæt (the same meaning; pronounced with the vowel of Modern Engl. at), we see that Engl. h corresponds to Latin k. A series of such regular correspondences separates Germanic from its non-Germanic Indo-European “relatives,” and this is what the shift is all about. The k ~ h pair is only one of nearly a dozen. When the shifted k arose more than two thousand year ago, it had the sound value of ch in Scots loch, but then the weakening of Germanic consonants set in (linguists call this process lenition), and the guttural sound was one of its casualties: it stopped being guttural and became “mere breath,” as we now have in home and hell. Degraded to breath, or aspiration, h began to disappear. In no other Germanic language has the habit of dropping one’s h’s advanced as far as in English, but it can be observed in all its modern and medieval neighbors, especially in popular speech. For example, in the delightful Middle Dutch narrative poem about the arch-scoundrel Reineke Fox (the French call the beast Reynard) h is dropped on a scale unthinkable in Modern Dutch. Standard English frowns upon h-less words, but in a few cases they managed to assert themselves. For instance, the form preceding modern them was hem, and that is why we say tell’em: it is not th that has been shed, but h. However, what the sound h has lost in pronunciation, the letter h has more than regained on paper.
Each case—the introduction of ch, sh, and gh—deserves a special essay, but I will devote this post only to th. Today th designates a voiceless consonant (as in cloth) and a voiced one (as in clothe). Both sounds existed in Old English, though their occurrence and distribution were partly different from what we find in the modern language, and there were special letters for them—þ (voiceless) and ð (voiced). They go back to the form of two ancient runes. But from early on the Romance tradition became dominant in Germanic scriptoriums: in German, Dutch, and English we find the digraphs (that is, two-letter groups) dh and th. Dh did not stay anywhere, but th did and is ambiguous, for, at least theoretically, it could be used f