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English uses a variety of digraphs to represent sounds which lack their own letters. Some of these (such as "th" and "sh") appear in native words; others (such as "kh") only appear in loanwords.
I know "th", "ph", and "ch" appear in Latin words borrowed from Greek, to represent θ, φ, χ. What other letters/digraphs did the Romans use to represent non-native sounds? Did these vary over time? Were any of the sounds "standardized", the way "kh" in English now tends to represent a velar fricative?
The letters K, Y, and Z were used for Greek words, along with the digraphs Ph, Th, Ch for aspirated stops, but other words were generally assimilated to Latin phonology. (Source: searching for the combinations below in the Packhum corpus and finding nothing.)
Jordanes' De Origine Actibusque Getarum uses Z when transcribing the sounds /ts/ and /dz/ in foreign languages, as well as on its own for /z/:
Other foreign sounds were still assimilated, but these particular combinations weren't utterly impossible in Latin (e.g. the compound etsi).
This tradition seems to have gotten slowly broader and broader over the next several centuries, as people with native Slavic names were mentioned in Latin texts (e.g. the 12th-century Bull of Gniezno with rz for a retroflex sibilant, ch for some sort of affricate, and z for various other Polish consonants; the 12th-century Chronica Slavorum with zc for /tʃ/).
Unfortunately, my sources are sparse, and more data from Classical or Late Latin would be appreciated: surely other writers than Jordanes mentioned foreign names.
