| H | |
| Letter: | H h |
| Script: | Latin script |
| Type: | Alphabet |
| Typedesc: | ic |
| Language: | Latin language |
| Unicode: | U+0048, U+0068 |
| Alphanumber: | 8 |
| Fam1: | |
| Usageperiod: | ~−700 to present |
| Associates: | h(x), ch, gh, nh, ph, sh, ſh, th, wh, (x)h |
| Direction: | Left-to-right |
H, or h, is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced, plural aitches), or regionally haitch, plural haitches.[1]
For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as and spelled "aitch"[1] or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation and the associated spelling "haitch" are often considered to be h-adding and are considered non-standard in England. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English,[2] 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 pronounced as //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.[3]
The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982,[4] and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, the pronunciation without the pronounced as //h// sound is still considered standard in England, although the pronunciation with pronounced as //h// is also attested as a legitimate variant.[5] In Northern Ireland, the pronunciation of the letter has been used as a shibboleth, with Catholics typically pronouncing it with the pronounced as //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 pronounced as /la/ in Latin; this became pronounced as /la/ in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French pronounced as /ang/, and by Middle English was pronounced pronounced as /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 pronounced as /[...(h)a ka el ...]/ when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation of pronounced as /[(h)a ka]/ for H.[7]
The Greek Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets, before coming to represent a long vowel, pronounced as //ɛː//, still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative pronounced as //h//. In this context, the letter eta is also known as Heta. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value pronounced as //h//.
While Etruscan and Latin had pronounced as //h// as a phoneme, almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the pronounced as //h// phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary pronounced as //h// from pronounced as //f//, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed pronounced as /[h]/ as an allophone of pronounced as //s// or pronounced as //x// in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of pronounced as //ʀ//. 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch', which represents pronounced as //tʃ// in Spanish, Galician, and Old Portuguese; pronounced as //ʃ// in French and modern Portuguese; pronounced as //k// in Italian and French.
| (Pinyin) | pronounced as /link/ | |
|---|---|---|
| English | pronounced as /link/, silent | |
| French | silent | |
| German | pronounced as /link/, silent | |
| silent | ||
| Spanish | silent | |
| Turkish | pronounced as /link/ |
In English, (h) occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing the voiceless glottal fricative pronounced as /link/ and in various digraphs:
The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, and 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 pronounced as //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. It was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the indefinite article before a word beginning with pronounced as //h// in an unstressed syllable, as in "an historian", but the use of a is now more usual.
In English, the pronunciation of (h) 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 (hit), /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.
In German, following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word German: erhöhen ('heighten'), the second (h) is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent (h) in nearly all instances of (th) in native German words such as thun ('to do') or Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as German: Theater ('theater') and German: Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with (th) even after the last German spelling reform.
In Spanish and Portuguese, (h) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in pronounced as /es/ ('son') and pronounced as /pt/ ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound pronounced as //h//. In words where the (h) is derived from a Latin pronounced as //f//, it is still sometimes pronounced with the value pronounced as /[h]/ in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias, Cantabria, and the Americas. Some words beginning with pronounced as /[je]/ or pronounced as /[we]/, such as Spanish; Castilian: label=none|hielo|lit=ice and Spanish; Castilian: label=none|huevo|lit=egg, were given an initial (h|) to avoid confusion between their initial semivowels and the consonants (j) and (v). This is because (j) and (v) used to be considered variants of (i) and (u) respectively. (h) also appears in the digraph (ch), which represents pronounced as /link/ in Spanish and northern Portugal, and pronounced as /link/ in varieties that have merged both sounds (the latter originally represented by (x) instead), such as most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish dialects, prominently Chilean Spanish.
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" (h), is considered as though the letter were not there at all. 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 (h) is called h aspiré ("aspirated '(h)'", 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 (h) was added to disambiguate the pronounced as /[v]/ and semivowel pronounced as /[ɥ]/ pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters (v) and (u): huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).
In Italian, (h) has no phonological value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs 'ch' pronounced as //k// and 'gh' pronounced as //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 (h) as a breathy voiced glottal fricative pronounced as /[ɦ]/, often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless pronounced as //h// in a voiced environment.
In Hungarian, the letter represents a phoneme pronounced as /link/ with four allophones: pronounced as /link/ before vowels, pronounced as /link/ between two vowels, pronounced as /link/ after front vowels, and pronounced as /link/ word-finally after back vowels. It can also be a silent word-finally after back vowels. It is pronounced as /link/ when geminated. In archaic spelling, the digraph (ch) represents pronounced as /link/ (as in the name Széchenyi) and pronounced as /link/ (as in pech, which is pronounced pronounced as /[pɛxː]/); in certain environments it breaks palatalization of a consonant, as in the name Beöthy, which is pronounced pronounced as /[bøːti]/ (without the intervening h, the name Beöty could be pronounced pronounced as /[bøːc]/); and finally, it acts as a silent component of a digraph, as in the name Vargha, pronounced pronounced as /[vɒrgɒ]/.
In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, (h) is also commonly used for pronounced as //ɦ//, which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter (г).
In Irish, (h) is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words; however, (h) placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates the lenition of that consonant; (h) 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 (h) and the digraph (ch) always represent pronounced as //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, a 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).
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 pronounced as /link/ represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form pronounced as /link/ represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative (or trill). With a bar, minuscule pronounced as /link/ is used for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Specific to the IPA, a hooked pronounced as /link/ is used for a voiced glottal fricative, and a superscript pronounced as /link/ is used to represent aspiration.
See main article: article and H (disambiguation).
Modifier letter capital H with stroke is used in VoQS to represent faucalized voice.
H
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859, and Macintosh families of encodings.