Asmus Freytag:
>
> All languages change over time and spelling tends to shed redundant or
> inoperative letters, if and when they are no longer useful. That firmly
> applies to the old-style th or tz in German, where the 'h' or 't' were
> removed, respectively. These serve no particular purpose, unlike the silent
> 'k' in English "knight", which distinguishes the word from "night", at least
> in writing.
This is becoming really off-topic, but please let me clarify this widely
repeated misconception. The German ‘th’ was indeed abolished at the turn of the
20th century from the official orthography, only to be kept in (apparent) loan
words, but it actually served a regular purpose that was just a bit more
complex than most rules and can be phrased as a special case for one:
Within a morphemic stem, an ‘h’ may be used canonically to show the
increased length or stress of a single-letter vowel (including umlauts) and is
placed immediately thereafter, *but* if there is a ‘t’ in that syllable
(preferably) before or after the vowel – an ‘r’ or ‘l’ glide may arguably come
in between –, it attracts this _Dehnungs-h_ to form a ‘th’ (or ‘Th’) digraph:
_thun, that, Thäter; rathen, Rathhaus; Thresen; Werth_. If, however, the ‘h’
was needed to separate the vowel from an end schwa, realized as an ‘e’, the
digraph is inhibited: _Truhe_, not _*Thrue_.
The transcribed theta in Greek loan words is treated exactly the same, and in
most cases survived the reform 30 years ago, although they were on the
shortlist to be dropped. This lead(s) to hurdles in learning to spell where
it’s not naively possible, e.g. the ‘y’ in _Rhythmus_ is short (but stressed).
Many German-speaking children in grammar school still go through a phase of
misspelling many long vowels with an ‘h’ afterwards, e.g. _*Tühr_ instead of
current _Tür_ and old _Thür_, but I believe they are less likely to do so if
it’s _Türe_ in their regional dialect.
It might have had been better – because simpler, more regular – over a century
ago, to keep the ‘h’ but move it after the vowel consistently. That ship has
sailed, though, as have others.
