etymology

Anyone who speaks Spanish and at least one other Romance language will probably have noticed that many f sounds have disappeared entirely in Spanish, usually at the beginning of words. This atavistic 'f' has been replaced by a silent 'h', which at one point during the Middle Ages might have been...

One particularity of French is that many 'c' sounds changed into 'ch' (pronounced 'sh'). I have made a list of most of the words I could think of derived from Latin that underwent that mutation. Many of them were inherited by English (chain, chamber, change, chapel, charge, chaste), but a few...