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Day: July 22, 2016
Why is the Greek letter phi translated into English as “ph” and not “f”?
Because when Latin started transliterating Greek, φ was still pronounced as /pʰ/: a p followed by an h. The shift of /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/ occurred later (the first evidence for it, Koine Greek phonology notes, is from Pompeii.) Answered 2016-07-22 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-the-Greek-letter-phi-translated-into-English-as-ph-and-not-“f”/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Why are there relatively few personal names shared between Indo-European languages?
Brian is of course correct that naming simply isn’t as stable as, say, the Swadesh-100 list of core vocabulary, or for that matter syntax (VSO, SOV, SVO). Things change much more quickly now than they used to, so you could object to Brian’s example. In English, the most popular names change radically every couple of […]