Th (digraph)

Th is a digraph in the Latin script. It was originally introduced into Latin to transliterate Greek loan words. In modern languages that use the Latin alphabet, it represents a number of different sounds. It is the most common digraph in order of frequency in the English language.

The most logical use of ⟨th⟩ is to represent a consonant cluster of the phonemes /t/ and /h/, as in English knighthood. This is not a digraph, since a digraph is a pair of letters representing a single phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the separate characters.

The digraph ⟨th⟩ was first introduced in Latin to transliterate the letter theta ⟨Θ, θ⟩ in loans from Greek. Theta was pronounced as an aspirated stop /tʰ/ in Classical and Koine Greek.

⟨th⟩ is used in academic transcription systems to represent letters in east Asian alphabets that have the value /tʰ/. According to the Royal Thai General System of Transcription, for example, ⟨th⟩ represents a series of Thai letters with the value /tʰ/.

Because neither /tʰ/ nor /θ/ were native phonemes in Latin, the Greek sound represented by ⟨th⟩ came to be pronounced /t/. The spelling retained the digraph for etymological reasons. This practice was then borrowed into German, French, Dutch and other languages, where ⟨th⟩ still appears in originally Greek words, but is pronounced /t/. See German orthography. Interlingua also employs this pronunciation.

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