 Welcome to the End Notes Spelling Bee. In this mini-series, I'm following up on the question I asked in my video about spelling. What are your spelling pet peeves? Viewer Mr. Pippalop brought up the problem of CH words, particularly when CH sounds like SH. For this, we'll have to return to the letter C. As we saw in the main video, the soft C hard C rule in English came about because that hard C sound, represented by the letter C in Latin, eventually became a S sound in French when it appeared before front vowels. But this didn't happen evenly or all at once. Initially, C became palatalized to CH before a front vowel, and that's still how it's pronounced in modern Italian. In French, that CH continued to change, becoming a S sound, leading to our soft C hard C rule in English. But there were other situations in which that Latin C sound changed to a CH sound in French and stayed that way, as for instance, when coming before the back vowel, AH. So Latin cantare became old French chanté, and eventually English chant. Old English, by the way, had undergone a similar palatalization, so their letter C could represent both the C sound or the CH sound, as in the word chicken. But the Norman scribes re-spelled that first sound with the letter combination CH to avoid confusion, as they were already using that CH spelling to indicate the CH sound. The CH digraph, by the way, was initially invented by the Romans to represent a Greek sound that didn't exist in Latin. In Eastern dialects of Greek, the letter CHI made an aspirated CH sound, but in Western dialects it made a KS sound, and that's what was borrowed into the Etruscan alphabet and eventually into Latin as the letter X. So when the Romans needed to represent that Eastern Greek sound in long words, since they were already using the X, they had to invent a letter combination to represent Greek CHI, and we still see that spelling in Greek derived words in English. Eventually the CH digraph was used to represent the new CH sound in French. And though as we've seen, K before the back vowel AH became CH, this was only in the central French dialect, while in Norman French it remained as K, so English occasionally has pairs of words coming from two different dialects with different pronunciations, such as cattle and chattel, both coming from different dialects of French from the same Latin word. And in later French, CH further developed from the CH sound into a SH sound. So whereas in French loan words that entered English in the middle English period, the CH is pronounced CH, in later French borrowings the CH spelling indicates a SH sound, as in chef. So to sum all of this up, you can tell when and from what dialect a Latin word made it into English through French, depending on whether the C became a K, CH, or SH. As a side note, the hard G soft G rule shows a similar trajectory. So the hard G sound in Latin palatalized into the J sound before front vowels in French, which we see in French loan words like gesture. French J sound then continued to evolve into its current modern French sound, J, as in the second G in the French loan word garage. But that change didn't happen until after the middle English period when Anglo-Norman French was adding all those words to English. So although the letter G in French loan words can represent different sounds, J and J, it's again a useful way of telling when the word came into English. Magic in the middle English period and garage later on. I'll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more spelling B videos intermittently for the next while in between other main videos. Thanks for all the responses. As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people on the Endless Knot podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms, as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching.