Deleted:H

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This page is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see H (disambiguation).
Template:Infobox grapheme

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H, or h, is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced /eɪtʃ/, plural aitches), or regionally haitch /heɪtʃ/.[1]

History

Egyptian hieroglyph
fence 		Proto-Sinaitic
ḥaṣr 		Phoenician
Heth 		Greek
Heta 		Etruscan
H 		Latin
H
<hiero>N24</hiero> x30px x30px x25pxx20px
x20pxx20px 		x25px x20px

The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (Template:IPA link). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.

The Greek Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets, before coming to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/, still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. In this context, the letter eta is also known as Heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/.

While Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as an allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of /ʀ/. 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch', which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish, Galician, and Old Portuguese; /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese; /k/ in Italian and French.

Name in English

For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as /eɪtʃ/ and spelled "aitch"[1] or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling "haitch" is often considered to be h-adding and is considered non-standard in England.[2] It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English,[3] and occurs sporadically in various other dialects.

The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an H-bomb" or "a H-bomb". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.[4]

The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982,[5] and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, the pronunciation without the /h/ sound is still considered to be standard in England, although the pronunciation with /h/ is also attested as a legitimate variant.[2] In Northern Ireland, the pronunciation of the letter has been used as a shibboleth, with Catholics typically pronouncing it with the /h/ and Protestants pronouncing the letter without it.[6]

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was Template:IPA-la in Latin; this became Template:IPA-all in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French Template:IPA-all, and by Middle English was pronounced Template:IPA-enm. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K: reciting the former's ..., H, K, L,... as [...(h)a ka el ...] when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation [(h)a ka] for H.[7]

Use in writing systems

English

In English, Template:Angbr occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing the voiceless glottal fricative (/h/) and in various digraphs, such as Template:Angbr /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), Template:Angbr (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), Template:Angbr (/f/), Template:Angbr (/r/), Template:Angbr (/ʃ/), Template:Angbr (/θ/ or /ð/), Template:Angbr (Template:IPAslink[8]). The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, as well as in certain other words (mostly of French origin) such as hour, honest, herb (in American but not British English) and vehicle (in certain varieties of English). Initial /h/ is often not pronounced in the weak form of some function words including had, has, have, he, her, him, his, and in some varieties of English (including most regional dialects of England and Wales) it is often omitted in all words (see [[h-dropping|'Template:Angbr'-dropping]]). It was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the indefinite article before a word beginning with /h/ in an unstressed syllable, as in "an historian", but use of a is now more usual (see Template:Slink). In English, The pronunciation of Template:Angbr as /h/ can be analyzed as a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example the word Template:Angbr, /hɪt/ is realized as [ɪ̥ɪt].[9] H is the eighth most frequently used letter in the English language (after S, N, I, O, A, T, and E), with a frequency of about 4.2% in words.[citation needed] When h is placed after certain other consonants, it modifies their pronunciation in various ways, e.g. for ch, gh, ph, sh, and th.

Other languages

In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen ('heighten'), the second Template:Angbr is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent Template:Angbr in nearly all instances of Template:Angbr in native German words such as thun ('to do') or Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater ('theater') and Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with Template:Angbr even after the last German spelling reform.

In Spanish and Portuguese, Template:Angbr (hache Template:IPA-es in Spanish, agá Template:IPA-pt in Portuguese) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo Template:IPA-es ('son') and húngaro Template:IPA-pt ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/. In words where the Template:Angbr is derived from a Latin /f/, it is still sometimes pronounced with the value [h] in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias, Cantabria, and the Americas. Some words beginning with [je] or [we], such as Template:Lang-es and Template:Lang-es, were given an initial Template:Angbr to avoid confusion between their initial semivowels and the consonants Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr. This is because Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr used to be considered variants of Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr respectively. Template:Angbr also appears in the digraph Template:Angbr, which represents Template:IPAslink in Spanish and northern Portugal, and Template:IPAslink in varieties that have merged both sounds (the latter originally represented by Template:Angbr instead), such as most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish dialects, prominently Chilean Spanish.

In French, the name of the letter is written as "ache" and pronounced /aʃ/. The French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter either way. The H muet, or "mute" Template:Angbr, is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so for example the singular definite article le or la, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides before an H muet followed by a vowel. For example, le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of Template:Angbr is called h aspiré ("[[aspirated h|aspirated 'Template:Angbr']]", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For example in le homard ('the lobster') the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic Template:Angbr was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

In Italian, Template:Angbr has no phonological value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs 'ch' /k/ and 'gh' /ɡ/, as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are homophones, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno, 'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), and in short interjections (oh, ehi).

Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian use Template:Angbr as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Hungarian, the letter has no fewer than five pronunciations, with three additional uses as a productive and non-productive element of digraphs. The letter h may represent /h/ as in the name of the Székely town Hargita; intervocalically it represents /ɦ/ as in tehén; it represents /x/ in the word doh; it represents /ç/ in ihlet; and it is silent in cseh. As part of a digraph, it represents, in archaic spelling, /t͡ʃ/ with the letter c as in the name Széchenyi; it represents, again, with the letter c, /x/ in pech (which is pronounced [pɛxː]); in certain environments it breaks palatalization of a consonant, as in the name Beöthy which is pronounced [bøːti] (without the intervening h, the name Beöty could be pronounced [bøːc]); and finally, it acts as a silent component of a digraph, as in the name Vargha, pronounced [vɒrgɒ].

In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, Template:Angbr is also commonly used for /ɦ/, which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter Template:Angbr.

In Irish, Template:Angbr is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words, however Template:Angbr placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates lenition of that consonant; Template:Angbr began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.

In most dialects of Polish, both Template:Angbr and the digraph Template:Angbr always represent /x/.

In Basque, during the 20th century it was not used in the orthography of the Basque dialects in Spain but it marked an aspiration in the North-Eastern dialects. During the standardization of Basque in the 1970s, the compromise was reached that h would be accepted if it were the first consonant in a syllable. Hence, herri ("people") and etorri ("to come") were accepted instead of erri (Biscayan) and ethorri (Souletin). Speakers could pronounce the h or not. For the dialects lacking the aspiration, this meant a complication added to the standardized spelling.

Other systems

As a phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it is used mainly for the so-called aspirations (fricative or trills), and variations of the plain letter are used to represent two sounds: the lowercase form Template:IPAalink represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form Template:IPAalink represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative (or trill). With a bar, minuscule Template:IPAalink is used for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Specific to the IPA, a hooked Template:IPAalink is used for a voiced glottal fricative, and a superscript Template:IPAalink is used to represent aspiration.

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

Ancestors, siblings, and descendants in other alphabets

Armenian letter ho (Հ)

Derived signs, symbols, and abbreviations

Computing codes

Template:Charmap

1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859, and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

Template:Letter other reps

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "H" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch" or "haitch", op. cit.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?". BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588. 
  3. ↑ Dolan, T. P. (1 January 2004). A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English. Gill & Macmillan Ltd. ISBN 9780717135356. https://books.google.com/books?id=uPo0oB19gDUC. Retrieved 3 September 2016. 
  4. ↑ Todd, L. & Hancock I.: "International English Ipod", page 254. Routledge, 1990.
  5. ↑ John C. Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, page 360, Pearson, Harlow, 2008
  6. ↑ Dolan, T. P. (1 January 2004). A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English. Gill & Macmillan Ltd. ISBN 9780717135356. https://books.google.com/books?id=uPo0oB19gDUC. 
  7. ↑ Liberman, Anatoly (7 August 2013). "Alphabet soup, part 2: H and Y". Oxford Etymologist. Oxford University Press. https://blog.oup.com/2013/08/alphabet-soup-letter-h-y-origin-etymology/. 
  8. ↑ In many dialects, /hw/ and /w/ have merged
  9. ↑ "phonology - Why is /h/ called voiceless vowel phonetically, and /h/ consonant phonologically?". https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4834/why-is-h-called-voiceless-vowel-phonetically-and-h-consonant-phonologically/4836. 
  10. ↑ Constable, Peter (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04132-n2740-phonetic.pdf. 
  11. ↑ Miller, Kirk; Ashby, Michael (2020-11-08). "L2/20-252R: Unicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), pulmonic". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20252r-mod-ipa-a.pdf. 
  12. ↑ Everson, Michael (2002-03-20). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02141-n2419-uralic-phonetic.pdf. 
  13. ↑ Ruppel, Klaas; Aalto, Tero; Everson, Michael (2009-01-27). "L2/09-028: Proposal to encode additional characters for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09028-n3571-upa-additions.pdf. 
  14. ↑ Anderson, Deborah; Everson, Michael (2004-06-07). "L2/04-191: Proposal to encode six Indo-Europeanist phonetic characters in the UCS". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04191-n2788-laryngeals.pdf. 
  15. ↑ Cook, Richard; Everson, Michael (2001-09-20). "L2/01-347: Proposal to add six phonetic characters to the UCS". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2001/01347-n2366r.pdf. 
  16. ↑ Everson, Michael (2005-08-12). "L2/05-193R2: Proposal to add Claudian Latin letters to the UCS". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2005/05193r2-n2960r2-claudian.pdf. 
  17. ↑ West, Andrew; Everson, Michael (2019-03-25). "L2/19-092: Proposal to encode Latin Letter Reversed Half H". https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19092-n5039-reversed-half-h.pdf. 

External links

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