On Consonant Pairs (and TH especially) in the English language

Hwat’s Qis [sic]? A goth? NB: Don't take all of this at face value, there are some exaggerations.

Curiosity as to which pairs of consonants occur most frequently in the English language led me to conduct this interesting research, the conclusions of which will be presented here forthwith. My interest in this topic arose from looking at J.R.R.Tolkien’s runes in Lord of the Rings. Some of his letters have the sounds of two consonants. I wondered what would need to be changed to make runes more useful for writing English.

After an unfruitful search of the internet, I decided that I needed to write my own program in the C programming language to determine the answer to this problem. The source code and executable of the program (named lettray.exe) can be found here. It is a very small and quick program and you should have no trouble using it if you wish.
As for texts to analyze I was able to easily download the full texts of public domain novels from the Project Gutenberg website (www.gutenberg.net).

A quick way to find the number of occurrences of a certain letter sequence is to use a word processor and use the ‘replace’ function. For example, replace all "CH" with "QQ" and the program will tell you "327 replacements made".

My table of results follows below:

TITLE & Author Date written Country of Author (translator) Top 10 Consonant Pairs with Frequency

TROILUS & CRISEYDE
by Geoffrey Chaucer 1355 England TH 9089 ND 3933 ST 1880 GH 1631 SH 1387 HT 1318 WH 1178 CH 1018 RT 936 YN 912 TR 894 NG 873 LL 809 LY 791 LD 763

KING LEAR
by William Shakespeare 1606 England TH 3563 ND 1321 ST 1131 LL 920 NT 771 NG 633 WH 609 MY 484 SH 433 CH 418 RS 407 LD 397 RT 340 GH 336 RD 320

MACBETH
by William Shakespeare 1605 England TH 2855 ND 953 ST 676 LL 559 NG 484 NT 433 WH 429 CH 371 CB * 291 RS 282 RT 277 SH 276 LD 246 GH 242 SS 241

ESSAYES of Francis Bacon 1625 England TH 8741 ND 3287 ST 1755 NG 1482 NT 1322 LL 1215 CH 1207 WH 1040 RS 925 NS 854 RT 842 SS 673 PR 671 LY 669 TR 610

PILGRIMS PROGRESS
by John Bunyan 1678 England TH 10521 ND 3092 ST 1992 NG 1636 LL 1539 CH 1396 WH 1288 NT 1118 HR 808 LD 759 SH 726 GH 715 RS 545 NS 528 LY 524

ROBINSON CRUSOE
by Daniel Defoe 1719 England TH 16505 ND 7468 NG 3883 ST 3263 LL 2703 WH 2598 NT 2594 MY 2442 CH 2093 LD 1851 SH 1708 GH 1625 LY 1323 HT 1174 RY 1084

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
by Jonathan Swift
1727 England TH 14410 ND 6133 ST 3807 NG 3576 NT 3081 WH 2488 CH 2195 LL 2076 MY 1831 RS 1718 LD 1558 TR 1514 RT 1421 NS 1376 PR 1373

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 1771 USA TH 8406 ND 3883 NG 2859 NT 2269 ST 1781 PR 1302 CH 1295 LL 1283 WH 1262 RS 1042 NS 1006 LY 984 SS 899 NC 898 MY 822

EMMA
by Jane Austen 1815 England TH 15727 ND 7914 NG 6334 ST 4652 LL 4376 SH 3847 NT 3724 CH 3198 LY 2823 LD 2731 RY 2482 WH 2435 GH 2419 RS 2391 SS 2344

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA (vol 1) by Alexis de Toqueville 1835 FRANCE
(England?) TH 34639 ND 9791 ST 9300 NT 8201 NS 5204 WH 5025 CH 4898 NG 4605 NC 4035 TS 3807 PR 3704 LL 3395 CT 3343 TR 3235 SS 3129

HUCKELBERRY FINN
by Mark Twain 1885 USA TH 12312 ND 8340 NG 3978 LL 3090 ST 2833 WH 1874 LD 1840 NT 1593 SH 1541 CH 1422 CK 1395 GH 1387 HT 1026 YS 960 DN 905

CALL OF THE WILD
by Jack London 1903 USA TH 4908 ND 2292 NG 1581 ST 1112 NT 870 LL 738 CK 689 WH 608 CH 556 TR 526 LY 523 GH 472 SH 451 LD 380 SS 356

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1920 USA TH 9881 ND 4328 NG 3129 ST 2882 LL 2386 NT 2344 LY 1690 RY 1652 SH 1352 WH 1291 CH 1285 GH 1226 RS 1162 SS 1082 NC 901

NASB version of the Bible
(4 gospels) 1977 USA TH 12627 ND 6694 NG 3053 WH 2408 LL 2254 ST 1704 NT 1456 SH 1016 CH 986 RS 785 RD 782 NS 741 LD 725 PL 621 GH 599

NIV version of the Bible
(4 gospels) 1984 Britain TH 12142 ND 4142 LL 2463 NG 2267 WH 2223 ST 1689 NT 1489 PL 975 CH 942 RS 803 RD 704 LD 703 NS 693 SH 642 GH 599

Brief Analysis

I tried to see if there was any variation in most common consonant pairs over the centuries. You can see that there is some, but not much. The YN in Chaucer come from words like "myn" for "mine". In the 1700’s words containing MY seem to have been more popular. In the latter half of the 20^th century, there seem to be more words containing PL – but I need to find another two non-copyright texts to analyse. Shakespeare’s plays have the names of the speaker at the beginning of every paragraph spoken – hence, CB is one of the top 10 consonant pairs in Macbeth.

It is possible that some editions of these works may have spelling modernized or ‘corrected’ thus giving the wrong results. However, from my brief look at the texts, Project Gutenberg seems to have kept the original wording and spelling. I also wanted to see if there were any differences between US and British works, but found nothing obvious in this small sample of texts. It was difficult thinking of texts from both countries in each century. One known difference is that American spelling often replaces the English S with Z as in "analyse", "paralyse", "recognise".

Commentary on Peculiarities

One can see from this sample of texts that in all cases for the last 400 years, TH is by far the most common consonant pair. This is very unfortunate for non-English speakers as the only languages with the TH sound are English, Greek, Gothic (long since gone!) and Icelandic. (Oh! the Zaragosa region of Spain pronounces S as TH because one of their rulers a long time ago had a lisp and they all had to imitate him. I wonder how they would speak if he had a stutter?!)

Why do we have a TH sound? The TH words in English came from Gothic, Scandinavian (Icelandic), and more recently, Greek. Here’s probably what happened:

Gothic died out around 1000 years ago (between 500 and 900 AD). [Perhaps Goths came up with this name for themselves so that no one else could pronounce it!] Some of our words may have come from the Goths, but they are not a direct ancestor of English. The Goths were busy razing Rome and then raising Gothic Cathedrals, and never made it to Bonnie England. Marauding Vikings (750-1050) may have brought the dreaded TH sound to English shores.
(th-th-thanks for noth-th-thing!) Icelandic actually has two type of TH sounds, the ‘thorn’ þand the ‘edh’ ð. I don’t know how much Icelandic there is in English, but we also have two types of TH sounds – say "think" and "this" to hear the difference. Further down the (historical) road, Britain was importing many things from the continent. It seems that when words were imported from Germany and Holland, many ‘D’s were changed to ‘TH’s – e.g. ‘dank’ to ‘thank’ – definitely an improvement, right? Anglo-Saxon snobbery or just a thtrange custom? Finally, in the past century, cool technical words have been imported from Greek (like ‘thermometer’ and ‘telethon’), or simply made up from Greek sounding words. The Greek letter for TH is Q or q (theta), belovéd by trigonometry students around the world.

In all cases WH is also within the top 10 consonant pairs. Why do we have so many WH combinations when the H is silent? Well, in old English, WH was both written and pronounced as HW – say ‘hwat’ – literally. Almost all of the words that are now written as "WH…" were originally written "HW…". This changed when the Normans who conquered England in 1066 AD and redefinded the spelling of many words including these HW ones (don’t you wish that you had that power!). Finally, a few WH words were initially "W…" words which were aspirated by the addition of an H – such as "whip" from "wippe". Posh? – not!

Nowadays we generally don’t pronounce the ‘H’ anymore – except perhaps in Wales and in the word "white". (Are there hwite hwales in Wales?) Interestingly enough, professional singers pronounce WH words as HW to make them easier to understand and soften the vowels. Interestingly enough, Tolkein included a rune for the HW sound when he invented his elvish alphabet.

Having come full circle back to Tolkein, we will stop here.
[sic] means that the spelling error was in the original document and not intruduced [sic] in the publishing process.

Michael Harwood

12 Dec 2002

Addendum:
I just found out from my students that Albanian and Arabic also have the TH sound! If this is true, then perhaps there are more TH languages out there!

12 Jan 2003