Jim Allan a écrit :
For very long, which explains for example why French has a non etymological "h" in « huile » (oil) : to distinguish vile (she-bad) and vile (oil) written the same way but pronounced differently when the h was added. Catach is her Dictionnaire historique de l'orthographe française names this a diacritic h. It appeared around the XIIIth century.
Similarly _v_ and _u_ were for long only used as positional variants.
P. A.
The same is true for huit (8) / vit (he lives or virile member) , huitre (oyster) / vitre (window pane), huis (door) / vis (you (sing.) live, live ! or screw), etc.
