Latin
The Romans used ch to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, Greeks pronounced this as an aspirated voiceless velar plosive . In post-classical Greek (Koine and Modern) this sound developed into a fricative.
Read more about this topic: Ch (digraph)
Famous quotes containing the word latin:
“OUR Latin books in motly row,
Invite us to our task—
Gay Horace, stately Cicero:
Yet there’s one verb, when once we know,
No higher skill we ask:
This ranks all other lore above—
We’ve learned “’Amare’ means ‘to love’!””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)