![]() Observe the piece of verse known as Cædmon’s Hymn, below. Why do we then refer to the long-dead Anglo-Saxon language as “Old English,” if it is only a distant ancestor, and one, you’ll note, no English speaker today understands? There are many technical reasons for this, but to put it in plain terms: if English were a body, Anglo-Saxon might be the bones and ligaments: not only for the hardness of its consonants and its blunt, unadorned poetry, but because it contains the most common words in the language, the structural bits that hold together all those pan-linguistic borrowings. Shakespeare and other writers filled in the gaps (and still do), inventing words where they were lacking. Over the course of 1000 years, the language came together from extensive contact with Anglo-Norman, a dialect of French then became heavily Latinized and full of Greek roots and endings then absorbed words from Arabic, Spanish, and dozens of other languages, and with them, arguably, absorbed concepts and pictures of the world that cannot be separated from the language itself. Yet Hebrew is a much more guttural language, so their letter cheth (from which the Greeks got their letter X) has a far more pronounced palate sound.What is the English language? Is it Anglo-Saxon? It is tempting to think so, in part because the definition simplifies a linguistic history that defies linear summary. They then borrowed or adapted their alphabet from the Hebrew (if you examine both alphabets from that period, you will see the similarities). They didn’t have an alphabet until about the time of their classical poet, Homer. Why did the Ancient Greeks bother have two different letters for such a small difference in sound? So when you see CH, it also sounds like a K, but it’s a softer and a slightly more guttural sound. That’s why there’s a letter for K and another for CH in both the Hebrew and Greek languages. If you say these words aloud, you’ll notice the slightly different parts of your mouth that your tongue touches. ![]() You can hear the difference in the English words Kill and Christ. We always transliterate this as either C or CH. However, the other one looks like an X and is pronounced with the tongue touching the soft palate at the back of the mouth, which gives a breathier or more guttural sound. In Greek, one letter looks like a K and is pronounced that way, and we always transliterate this as a C, as described above. These names were originally pronounced as with a ‘K.’ So why not pronounce these correctly?īoth Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek had two letters pronounced like a K. Yet, when it comes to less familiar names, there’s nothing wrong with trying to pronounce them properly.įor example, consider the name of the sons of Chet, or the people called the Chaldeans. However, the mispronunciations are so deeply entrenched in English, that it’s probably better to deliberately pronounce well-known names incorrectly. The town of Laodicea was called La-oh-dee-kay-ah, and so on. The faithful woman Priscilla had her name pronounced like Pree-skee-lah. So the name Caesar was actually pronounced more like Kaiser. ![]() Even when a CH is used, it is the same, like in the word ‘CHrist.’ There is no ‘soft C’ pronunciation it is always a hard C, like in the English word ‘call’. Most English-speakers mispronounce Biblical names that contain the letters C or CH.
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