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 early Koin… See more

During late antiquity, the Greek phoneme represented by the letter ⟨θ⟩ mutated from an … See more

English also uses ⟨th⟩ to represent the voiced dental fricative /ð/, as in father. This unusual extension of the digraph to represent a voiced sound is caused by the fact that, in … See more

In the Latin alphabet for the Javanese language, ⟨th⟩ is used to transcribe the phoneme voiceless retroflex stop ʈ, which is written as ꦛ in the native Javanese script. See more

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 etymologic… See more