Episode 35: English Sounds and Roman Letters
The History of English Podcast
00:00
Germanic Fricatives in the Back of the Throat
In Old English, one version of a Germanic fricative sound was represented with a G. The unvoiced versions were represented by the letter H. These fine distinctions between voiced and unvoiced sounds started to be lost in the mix of Middle English. Increasingly, those scribes just combined the G and H together.
Transcript
Play full episode
