From: Patrick Andries (Patrick.Andries@xcential.com)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 10:54:22 CDT
Jim Allan a écrit :
>
>
> Similarly _v_ and _u_ were for long only used as positional variants.
>
For very long, which explains for example why French has a non
etymological "h" in « huile » (oil) : to distinguish vile (she-bad) and
vile (oil) written the same way but pronounced differently when the h
was added. Catach is her Dictionnaire historique de l'orthographe
française names this a diacritic h. It appeared around the XIIIth century.
P. A.
The same is true for huit (8) / vit (he lives or virile member) , huitre
(oyster) / vitre (window pane), huis (door) / vis (you (sing.) live,
live ! or screw), etc.
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