and it found 33 hits for "phisica" and 99 for "phisico", mostly from the 1490s. Now some of these can be deceptive, like a few are from a bilingual Spanish-Latin book and occur in the Latin portions rather than the Spanish portions, but it seems like some authors in the 1400s wrote "ph" in some Spanish words, at least when they knew the Latin or Greek etymologies.
I don't know when the Iberian languages first got their more phonetic orthographies, especially suppressing that h (that was originally in Latin digraphs used to transliterate Greek letters θ, φ, χ).
Edit: There are also about two dozen hits for physico/physica, interestingly more from the 1700s rather than 1400s.
> but it seems like some authors in the 1400s wrote "ph" in some Spanish words, at least when they knew the Latin or Greek etymologies.
You know, that might be analogous to Spanish speakers familiar with English writing "tweet" in Spanish text, while being ignorant that RAE added "tuit"[1] to the language, which is more in-line with general language rules. IDK if any Spanish speaker has ever written "tuit" in real life.
> I agree that my read may not be correct either
Just in case, by "you", I meant from the POV of the AI, not you the author.
That's interesting to know about "ph". I didn't know it was present in Latin, and I wonder if that's also the case with Spanish.