On 2022-08-20, Apostolos Syropoulos via XeTeX <xetex@tug.org> wrote: > My question is if English language speakerslearn in school why they write > history andnot istory. The answer seems to be: No.What you say is completely
What do you expect us to learn? The word is pronounced with /h/ and written with h-. It's written with h- because we borrowed it from languages which wrote it with h-, some of which pronounced it (classical Latin, Greek) and some of which no longer did (French); we borrowed it in writing and pronounced it accordingly. That doesn't seem like something one has to learn - it's the obvious. What one has to learn is why we write some words with an h that we *don't* pronounce. The answer to that is a fairly complex sociolinguistic explanation plus random chance in evolution.
