# .font: font.text_2
2023-01-29 15:00 dustin  
# .font: font.text_1
eanwhile, ^ tries to guess in advance what each letter originally symbolized! as for "h", ^ had guessed a kind of ladder, and it turns out that this was not far from the truth!  
  
history of the letter "h":  
  
| the egyptian root is likely a hieroglyph for a fence (see ||| shape below the start). this really looks much like a ladder, but what ^ had forgotten is that ladders were invented only in 1862... ;)  
  
| as usual, this glyph was simplified considerably for the proto-sinaitic letter "hasr" (left ΔΔΔ shape).  
  
| the phoenicians made their eighth letter "heth" out of the glyph, which looks like a rectangle divided in two halves (see middle ΔΔΔ shape).  
  
| the greeks adopted the letter as "heta" without changing its form at first. sometimes they wrote it with an extra horizontal line (see the ΔΔΔ/ΙΙΙ shape at the right).  
  
| on its way via the etruscians to the romans, the letter was further simplified by deleting the top and bottom lines to become the familiar "h" shape as it is today.  
  
| the sound value of the letter changed only very slightly on its way from the egyptians to the romans. the egyptian "fence" glyph and the phoenician "heth" were both spoken very similarly to [h] as in "house". for comparison, here are the wikipedia articles with audio smples for both sounds:  
the "house"-[h]:  
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_glottal_fricative" target="external">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_glottal_fricative</a>  
and the sound of the early "h"-predecessors ("fence"-glyph, "hasr", "heth"):  
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_pharyngeal_fricative" target="external">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_pharyngeal_fricative</a>  
  
the first and only slight sound change was made by the greeks. beside "heth", they adopted another phoenician letter "he" which sounded exactly like the house-[h]. the greeks had no use for two such similar [h]-sounds, so they turned "he" into their vowel "epsilon" while "heta" was defined to sound like the house-[h]. this sound remained unchanged by the etruscians and romans later.  
  
| however, many romance languages (which developped from latin) later lost the [h] sound, which is the reason why today, many languages speak the letter "h" differently or have it completely silent. also, "h" often occurs in digraphs or trigraphs (= two- or three-letter combinations which represent one single sound). english examples are "ch" as in "cheers", "ph" as in "photo", "sh" as in "shoe" and „th“ as in „thunder“.  
  
remark: in modern greek, the "house"-[h] sound no longer exists, so the ancient letter "heta" became "eta" and is today spoken like english [ea] as in "easy". the letter is today shaped the same way as the latin "h".  
  
cave difficulty: 5/10

# .font: font.text_2
2023-01-29 15:04 dustin  
# .font: font.text_1
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