ovum to huevo
Not quite sure what category to put this into, so I'll start with General Discussion.
Does anyone know why the stressed "ue" at the beginning of a word in Spanish is spelled "hue"? I know that stressed "o" in Latin became "ue" in Spanish so that ovum turned into "uevo", like in Italian "uovo". But where did the mute "h" come from? Similar words are hueso or huelo, (from oler), or vuelve (from volver)
Words such as huerta or huésped don't fall into this category as they came from "horta" and "hospes" where the "h" existed in the original Latin word and which might have been aspirated a long time ago.
Might this have infulenced the spelling of huevo??
All this came about when I was learning the paradigm for oler. 
2 Answers
The H also serves to separate syllables that conatain vowels that would otherwise be next to one another, causing massive confusion for pronunciation, ie Chihuahua.
the u used to be printed as v, therefore words beginning with ue, like uevo, ueso, uelo etc, were printed as vevo, veso, velo at first, which caused a lot of ambiguities, that's why it got usual to attach an "h" to the beginning of all words beginning with ve, when they were pronounced ue.
