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Episode 153: Zombie Letters

The History of English Podcast

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What Happened to the Greek Words?

In the middle english period, words like team trone, etic, autentic panther and dip tong were all pronounced with a t sound. But then in the 14 hundred and 15 hundreds English writers and printers decided to mark those lone words as greek words by reviving the h that had been dropped. And they gave those words their t h spellings. From there, one of two things happened. In some cases, the pronunciation stayed the same, with the regular t sound that had been around since the words first passed into latin. So those words were now spelled with a t h, but pronounced with at sound. The same thing happened with names like thomas

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