What do we call the “rd” in “3ʳᵈ” and the “th” in “9ᵗʰ”? The addition of -th -eth relates to numbers 4 to 20 (and similarly,) and is a suffix to the cardinal number However, as in the second and third examples, the rd st simply come from the right-end of the word for the ordinal number: 3 rd: thi rd 301 st: (three-hundred-) fir st (shouldn't that be 301 th?, I'm not going there)
“20th century” vs. “20ᵗʰ century” - English Language Usage . . . There they have idiosyncratically used 20 th rather than 20 th, but the point is that the letters and numbers — more properly, the figures — look different Figures can be proportionally spaced like letters, and so a digit 1 would take up less room than a digit 4
Why was the th combination chosen for the th sound? The origin of 'th' really has nothing to do with the development of the English language It comes directly from the Roman alphabet From Wikipedia : The digraph ‹th› was introduced in Latin, which used it to transliterate the letter theta ‹Θ, θ› in loans from Greek Theta was pronounced as an aspirated stop tʰ in Classical and
Is there a rule for pronouncing “th” at the beginning of a word? The Old English Latin alphabet adapted the runic letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth) to represent this sound, but the digraph th gradually superseded these letters in Middle English However, in early Old English of the 7th and 8th centuries, the runic letters were initially not used yet and the digraph used in its place
Is there any rule for differentiating between the endings th and ht? The secondary issue is that of spelling, as you find th and ht confusing This is a matter of mis-parsing some common English digraphs This is a matter of mis-parsing some common English digraphs When attempting to read those words, you shouldn't take h and t together, but rather g and h together, as the digraph gh is pretty common in English
How to pronounce th - English Language Usage Stack Exchange By the way, it's important in English to never pronounce "th" as z (when voiced) or s (when unvoiced) Unlike in Arabic, these are not common pronunciation variants for native speakers, even in the most informal or dialectical speech They are a strong sign of a foreign accent
fast speech rules - How to pronounce TH quickly? - English Language . . . In historical linguistics, 'th-' tends to be a transitional sound, that is, over centuries the intermediate variety may have a 'th-' but earlier and later ones may not A common phenomenon is 'lenition' or softening (Latin pater, Italian padre, Spanish padre (with fricative instead of stop), and French père (where the 'd' is softened to nothing)
abbreviations - When were st, nd, rd, and th, first used - English . . . In English, Wikipedia says these started out as superscripts: 1 st, 2 nd, 3 rd, 4 th, but during the 20 th century they migrated to the baseline: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th So the practice started during the Roman empire, and probably was continuously used since then in the Romance languages I don't know when it was adopted in English Here is a