Why is the name Thomas not spelled Tomas?

Question

Why the "H"?

Answer 1

I mean you could always name ur kid Tomas, so Thomas is proly just a variation

Answer 2

Chalk it up to the nuances of linguistics. The dipthong "th" softens the T sound in English and gives it a similar pronunciation to the more blunted t sound in the Romance languages.

Answer 3

because the english language likes to make everything more diffucult than it needs to be

Answer 4

Tomas, is european

dont know why the H ,

Answer 5

I believe that spelling it "Tomas" is European...and Ithat "Thomas" is the English spelling of the name.

Answer 6

thomas give the "thaw" sound n tomas gives the "toh" sound

Answer 7

because its English. its a complicated language. why is KNIFE spelled with K?

Answer 8

Thomas stems from the greek for "twin" and according to Oxford, the Th spelling in English is an organic derivation from the original spelling which began with the Greek letter theta. It's pronounced the same as Tomas due to influence from French.

Knife, to respond to another commenter, is spelled with a k in English because, like many other kn words, including knight, k**b, and know it was once pronounced that way- k-nife, k-night (probably more like k-nigh-it, actually, but there's no way to be certain. The pronounciation changed, the spelling didn't. This may have been due to foreign language and accent influence, but no one is certain why. All we know is that at some point, a common sound in old English, kn, became awkward for English speakers to say, so they stopped doing it.