You’ve probably heard how Neanderthal is pronounced and even spelled “Neandertal” in modern German. The word for valley, Tal, was spelled Tal in Old High German (and is now again), but in between it was “Thal” for centuries.
Plenty of knowledge sources are happy to tell you this fact. (It also makes a surefire way to announce yourself as an insufferable bore at a party.)
At the time, thal was the region’s word for valley: Neander Thal, Neander Valley. In the early twentieth century thal changed to tal when the government standardized spelling across Germany.
The German /t/ phoneme was frequently spelled th from the 15th to 19th centuries until the German Orthographic Conference of 1901. The German spelling Thal (“valley”, a cognate of English dale) changed to Tal, and the h was also dropped from Neandertal for the valley and Neandertaler for the species.
Quite simply – when the location where the skeletal remains were discovered became famous, around 1860, years after the discovery, the word “Thal” was spelled with an “h.”
Hold on, it isn’t quite so simple. Nobody ever explains how that h ever got in there in the first place. Whose bright idea was it? What was its purpose? Did it have any purpose? In the olden days, parchment being expensive, scribes shortened words as much as possible. To lengthen a word, you’d expect them to have a serious reason. It wouldn’t make the word any easier to read, even in blackletter.
The h in Thai is there for a reason: it means there’s an aspirated stop /tʰ/. The name Thomas, from ancient Greek Θωμᾶς with theta, is in fact pronounced with /tʰ/ in English, the same as ancient Greek (but not the same as modern Greek).
In both examples, h was put there for an intelligible reason. Which only goes to demonstrate my point.
The Latin name Antonius became “Anthony” in English because some clever chap long ago tried to connect it with the Greek word for flower, anthos. He was too clever for his own good, because there’s no connection, it was all in his imagination. But it stuck. It was a crap reason for introducing the h, but it was still a reason. Nobody’s ever come up with any reason why German stuck in a perfectly useless letter. So if Peter Thiel didn’t want his name pronounced /θiːl/, he shouldn’t have used an h in it.
I have always assumed it’s because it’s aspirated. Is it aspirated in German, or used to be? Does aspiration ever make a phonemic difference in German?
You’ve already explained it – it was the classical period when everything Old Greek was hip, including the distinction between aspirated theta and non-aspirated tau. So Prussian authorities changed the spelling of words beginning with an aspirated T. That only occurs before vowels, so Thal but Treiben.
You are also correct that they later had a “what were we thinking” moment and took the unification of orthography in the newly-founded Reich as an opportunity to change it back such that the Th remains only in foreign words that actually trace back to Greek theta.
Hmm, good question. I hadn’t noticed until you mentioned it that German does aspirate /p, t, k/ in the absence of /s/, especially in northern dialects and especially in stressed syllables. That could well be the answer! Even though it was allophonic as in English and not phonemic. When phonemes are traditionally the basis for an alphabet. The northern German pattern of aspirating unvoiced initial stops is pretty much the same as that in English. (Today I learned)
I could ask the same of the old country-name spellings Thibet and Esthonia.
I asked a Lebanese friend why the French spell Beyrouth with an h added at the end, and he said it was to make sure the /t/ is pronounced, as it often isn’t when final in French. OK, that one is intelligible. That would also explain the old spelling “Carmathian” for Qarmatian, referring to al-Qarāmiṭah. To ensure that the string -”tia” would be pronounced with a stop /t/, instead of /si/ as would be usual in French or /ʃ/ as in English.
I’ve wondered about the “h” in French thé ( tea) for a long time. The super-helpful Wiktionary entry reveals that French speakers adopted the spelling of Dutch thee, and - like Thal in the OP - the Dutch used the “th” as kind of a faux Greek thing.
I attended college with someone whose last name was Thalhammer. Now that I think about it, he pronounced his name with the aspirated t as described above. However, he didn’t make a fuss when people pronounced it with a th, probably because he figured it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Looks like the best consensus we can get is half a fuzzy notion that it’s ersatz Greek plus half a fuzzy notion that it encoded aspiration.
To be clear: Aspiration is not spirantization. They share the same spir- etymon, but they’re quite different. Aspiration means adding a puff of breath to the release of a stop consonant: The initial /t/ in top has that puff of air, while the /t/ in stop doesn’t. Spirantization means changing a stop into a fricative: what English speakers have done to the /t/ in German Neandertal. You can’t blame us; if they didn’t want us saying it with /θ/, then they shouldn’t have spelled it with ⟨th⟩.