this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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I mean:

English

Russian

French? (how did this happen? France --> French?!?)

Chinese

And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔

Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain...

Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the "Ph" and decided to use an "F"? 🤔

Okay idk how language even works anymore...

[This is an open discusssion thread on languages and their quirks...]

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[–] Puschel_das_Eichhorn@lemm.ee -2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Em... Are you stoned?

  • Afghanistan means "land of the Afghans".
  • Hindi is just one out of hundreds of languages spoken in India. The words have the same origin. I am not sure what prompted the loss or gain of an "h", but English has nothing to do with it.
  • The Philippines/Filipino thing clearly works the other way around. I cannot think of any language besides English in which an "f" can be written as "ph".
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

Latin. In fact it's where this mess started out.

Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction between the following sets of consonants:

  • ⟨Φ Θ Χ⟩ /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ - they sound like English pill, till, kill; there's a clear asphhhhiration in them
  • ⟨Π Τ Κ⟩ /p t k/ - they sound like English spill, still, skill; no aspiration
  • ⟨Β Δ Γ⟩ /b d g/ - more like English bill, dill, give; instead of aspiration you vibrate the vocal folds before the consonant even starts

Latin borrowed a lot of Greek words. The words with the second and third set of consonants were no problem; they were mostly spelled in Latin with ⟨P T C⟩ and ⟨B D G⟩. But Latin didn't have the sounds of the first set, and for Latin speaking ears they sounded like they had /h/. So they were spelled with ⟨PH TH CH⟩, to represent that /h/ sound.

So back then the digraphs still made sense... except that Greek changed over time. And what used to be pronounced /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ ended as /f θ x/ (like English fill, think, and Scottish loch). And Latin speakers started pronouncing those words with the "new" Greek sounds instead of the old ones. But they were still spelling them the same.

From that that ⟨PH⟩ spread out across a lot of orthographies using the Latin alphabet.

[–] ZDL@ttrpg.network 3 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

French. Vietnamese (via the French influence) when transliterated. Italian (where in Greek-origin words you can see either being used). German (same as Italian, though over the years some words got formally modified from ph- to f-, but words like Philosophie is still spelled that way). Spanish and Portuguese too, though far more rarely than in Italian (where it is in turn far more rare than in French). Polish and Hungarian too, IIRC.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago

Italian and Spanish subbed ⟨PH⟩ with ⟨F⟩ ages ago; examples here and here. Portuguese stopped using it in 1911 (ACL / "European" standard) asd 1943 (ABL / "Brazilian") standard.

In Portuguese it was part of a wider wave of orthographic reforms, that also got rid of etymological double consonants and ⟨Y⟩. A lot of people were hilariously annoyed, example stolen from Wikipedia:

Imaginem esta palavra phase, escripta assim: fase. Não nos parece uma palavra, parece-nos um esqueleto (...) Affligimo-nos extraordinariamente, quando pensamos que haveriamos de ser obrigados a escrever assim!

Imagine this word phase, written like this: fase. It doesn't resemble us a word, it resemble us a skeleton. (...) We get profoundly afflicted, when we think that we would be required to write it like this!

[–] Puschel_das_Eichhorn@lemm.ee 1 points 7 hours ago

I wasn't referring to loanwords, so I'd say you could limit your list to just Greek.