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Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

and also by extension, Greek (directly in many cases -- almost every english word that starts with 'ph' was a greek word -- but also a large portion of medical and mathematical terminology)

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That's because in latin 'ph' was used in words from greek, but spanish uses 'f' AFAIK.

Fun fact: russian language had no 'f' sound prior to cyrillic alphabet which has a letter for it.

I suspect english words starting with 'ph' come from french, french words with 'ph' used 'ph' instead of 'f' (same sound) to emphase the fact the word borrow greek root (but who care the word come from greek, does it make it easier to learn? one more shitty rule of french).

Granted I don't have hard data on the "ph" fact, the source is pretty credible in my opinion. The fact appeared in an article written for the British Council, co-authored by Martha Peraki, a Linguistics PhD recipient from American University.

Heuristically, the "rule" passes the eyeball test: philosophy, physical, photo, phrase, philanthropy, phobia, phage, phalange, phalanx, phallic, phase, pharmacy, phantom, phenomenon, phone, photons, photosynthesis, physician, physique, phytoplankton, so on and so forth

The overwhelming majority of these words are greek transliterations https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-start-with-ph

(in fact I am having a hard time finding even one word that isn't -- i think "phreak" is the only one I can find)

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