muha

muha = fly in Slovene

There was only one “h” in the Proto-Slavic – voiceless velar fricative however East & West Slavic languages added also voiced glottal or velar fricatives to their inventories. South Slavic languages did not and they still have one voiceless velar fricative “h” – expressed as “h” in Latin alphabets (Slovene & Croatian) and as “х” in Cyrillic alphabets (Serbian, Bulgarian & Macedonian).

In East & West Slavic languages you have:
х & г in Belarusian & Ukrainian
ch & h in Czech, Slovak, Lower Sirbian & Upper Sorbian
(voiceless & voiced)

Two Slavic languages lost voiced “h” – Russian and Polish.

In Polish voiceless and voiced “h” were expressed respectively by “ch” and “h”. Then it retained voiceless sound but left “ch” and “h” in orthography causing a huge problem to pupils and students. Now “hart” (fortitude) and “chart” (greyhound) or “hełm” (helmet) and “Chełm” (city in Poland) sound exactly the same.

There are two more pairs of sounds in Polish that are the same now. The sounds rz=ż and u=ó causing more problems during spelling bees.

Photo by @lukaszdaciuk (Instagram)

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