Endnotes Spelling Bee: When 'ch' says 'sh'

Another follow-up to "Spelling", about the many sounds of "ch".

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes Spelling Bee! In this miniseries I’m following up on the question I asked in my video about Spelling: what are your spelling pet peeves? Viewer Mr Peapolop brought up the problem of ch-words, particularly when ch sounds like sh.

For this we’ll have to return to the letter c. As we saw in the main video, the soft-C/hard-C rule in English came about because that hard /k/ sound represented by the letter c in Latin eventually became an /s/ sound in French when it appeared before front vowels. But this didn’t happen evenly or all at once. Initially c became palatalized to /tʃ before a front vowel, and that’s still how it’s pronounced in modern Italian. In French that /tʃ continued to change becoming a /s/ sound, leading to our soft-C/hard-C rule in English. But there were other situations in which that Latin /k/ sound changed to /tʃ in French and stayed that way, as for instance when coming before the back vowel /a/. So Latin cantare became Old French chanter and eventually English chant. Old English, by the way had undergone a similar palatalization, so their letter c could represent both the /k/ sound or the /tʃ sound as in the word cicen, but the Norman scribes respelled that second sound with the letter combination ch to avoid confusion, as they were already using the ch spelling to indicate the /tʃ sound. The ch digraph by the way was initially invented by the Romans to represent a Greek sound that didn’t exist in Latin. In eastern dialects of Greece the letter chi made an aspirated /kh/ sound, but in western dialects it make a /ks/ sound, and that’s what was borrowed into the Etruscan alphabet and eventually into Latin as the letter x. But when the Romans needed to represent that eastern Greek sound in loanwords, since they were already using x they had to invent a letter combination to represent Greek chi, and we still see that spelling in Greek-derived words in English. Eventually the ch digraph was used to represent the new /tʃ sound in French. And though as we’ve seen /k/ before the back vowel a became /tʃ, this was only in the central French dialect, while in Norman French it remained as /k/, so English occasionally has pairs of words coming from two different dialects with different pronunciations, such as cattle and chattel, both coming through different dialects of French from the same Latin word. And in later French ch further developed from the /tʃ sound into a /ʃ sound, so whereas in French loanwords that entered English in the Middle English period the ch is pronounced /tʃ, in later French borrowings the ch spelling indicates a /ʃ sound as in chef. So to sum all of this up you can tell when and from what dialect a Latin word made it into English through French, depending on whether the c became a /k/, /tʃ, or /ʃ.

As a side note, the hard-G/soft-G rule shows a similar trajectory. So the hard /g/ sound in Latin palatalized into the /dʒ sound before front vowels in French, which we see in French loanwords like gesture. That French /dʒ sound then continued to evolve into its current modern French sound /ʒ as in the second g in the French loanword garage, but that change didn’t happen until after the Middle English period, when Anglo-Norman French was adding all those words to English. So although the letter g in French loanwords can represent different sounds, /dʒ and /ʒ, it’s again a useful way of telling when the word came into English, magic in the Middle English period and garage later on.

I’ll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more Spelling Bee videos intermittently for the next while, in between other main videos. Thanks for all the responses! As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!