H

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Basic Latin alphabet
	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj
Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv
	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English is aitch^[1] (pronounced /eɪtʃ/). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Its lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative or 'aspirate', and its small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.

Contents 1 History 2 Usage in English 2.1 Name 2.2 Value in English 3 Usage in Spanish 4 Usage in French 5 Usage in German 6 Usage in Italian 7 Usage in other languages 8 Other representations 8.1 Computer codes 8.2 Other systems 9 See also 10 References

[edit] History

Egyptian hieroglyph fence	Proto-Semitic ħ	Phoenician ħ	Etruscan H	Greek eta

The Semitic letter ח (ḥêṯ) most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA: [ħ]). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on, this letter, eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, /ɛː/. (In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where Middle English ea /ɛː/ and ee /eː/ came to be both pronounced /iː/.)

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, but almost all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F, before losing it again (and now has developed an [h] allophone of /x/ in some Spanish-speaking countries, but this isn't spelled with h.) In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as for the phoneme /h/. This may be because /h/ was sometimes lost between vowels in German. H is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English /tʃ/, French and Portuguese /ʃ/ from /tʃ/, Italian /k/, German /χ/, Czech and Slovak /x/.

[edit] Usage in English

[edit] Name

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled aitch [1] or occasionally eitch. Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and hence a spelling of haitch is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English^[2] and other varieties of English, such as those of Malaysia and Singapore. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch.^[3] In Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching.^[4] The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an HTML page" or "a HTML page". 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.^[5]

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was /aha/; this became /aka/ in Latin, passed into English via Old French /atʃ/, and by Middle English was pronounced /aːtʃ/. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic.

[edit] Value in English

In English, H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value /h/ or silent) and in various digraphs, such as ch (/tʃ/, French and Portuguese-derived /ʃ/, Greek and Italian /k/, German and Scots /x/), gh (silent, /ɡ/, or /f/) , ph (Greek-derived words in /f/), rh (Greek words in /r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (/θ/ as in thin or /ð/ as in then), wh (/w/, /hw/, or /f/: see wine-whine merger). In transcriptions of other writing systems, zh may occur (as in Russian Doctor Zhivago); this is generally pronounced /ʒ/ in English, although this is not necessarily faithful to the sound in the original language, as in the case of pinyin transcriptions.

H is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed. H is often silent in the weak form of some function words beginning with H, including had, has, have, he, her, him, his. H is silent in some words of Romance origin:

• Initially in heir, honest, honour, hour; for American English usually also herb, and sometimes homage; as well as non-anglicized loanwords such as hors-d'oeuvres
• Internally in silhouette, chihuahua, and often piranha
• For some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as in "an historic occasion", "an hotel".
• After ex when x has value /ɡz/, as exhaust.
• For many speakers, after a stressed vowel and before an unstressed, as annihilate, vehicle (but not vehicular).

[edit] Usage in Spanish

In Spanish, H is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] ('son'), hola [ˈola] ('hello'), and hábil [ˈaβil] ('skillful'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound [h]. The [h] sound exists in a number of dialects in Spanish, either as a syllable-final allophone of /s/ (for example Andalusia, Argentina or Cuba - vg. esto [ˈeht̪o] 'this' , or as a dialectal realization of Standard /x/ (for example Mexican caja [ˈkaxa] 'box' ).

[edit] Usage in French

In the French language, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/.

The French language classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways that must be learned to use French properly, 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, so for example the singular definite article le or la is elided to l'. 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 is treated as a phantom consonant. 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). There are numerous exceptions.

In some cases, an h was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [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).

Some of these distinctions have been preserved in English through Anglo-French: an honour vs. a harp (though in this case, as many others in English, the use of a does not seem arbitrary because the initial h is still aspirated).

Dictionaries mark aspirated h words with a preceding diacritic symbol, such as an asterisk, a dagger, or a small raised circle.

[edit] Usage in German

In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/.

In the German language, this letter is used in the digraph "ch" and the trigraph "sch" to indicate completely different sounds. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen "heighten", only the first <h> represents /h/.

In 1901, there was a spelling reform which 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 Theater "theater" and Thron "throne", which continue to be spelled with <th> even after the last German spelling reform.

[edit] Usage in Italian

In Italian H has no real phonological value. It is rather a diacritic grapheme. The most important uses are:

• in verb avere (to have) it differentiates some forms of the present tense from other common words:
  • ho (I have, 1st person singular) vs. o (or, conjunction)
  • hai (you have, 2nd person singular) vs. ai (to the, preposition)
  • ha (he/she/it has, 3rd person singular) vs. a (to, preposition)
  • hanno (they have, 3rd person plural) vs. anno (year)

• in short interjections, to differentiate them from other common words (ah, oh, eh...) but also when no ambiguity is present (toh, beh). In these cases, the H reinforces the interjective nature of the word, which can be at the same time stressed by other signs like an exclamation mark. As a general rule for interjections, and also to avoid confusion with forms of the verb avere, the H should always be placed after the first syllable of the interjection: ahi!, ehi!, ohibò!.

• in digraphs ch and gh it indicated the pronunciation of the c and g letters as, respectively, /k/ and /ɡ/.

[edit] Usage in other languages

Some languages, including, but not limited to, English, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Finnish use H as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, H is also commonly used for /ɦ/, normally written with the Cyrillic letter Г. (Note the difference from Russian pronunciation and romanisation).

In Irish H after a consonant indicates lenition of that consonant; it is known as a séimhiú.

In Japanese, H refers to Hentai.

[edit] Other representations

[edit] Computer codes

In Unicode the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lower case h is U+0068.

The ASCII code for capital H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; or in binary 01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#72;" and "&#104;" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] Other systems

In British Sign Language (BSL), the letter 'h' is represented as both hands with flat palms where the right hand slides over left hand from the wrist to beyond the finger tips.

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: H

• ĥ
• ħ
• Н, н - En (Cyrillic)
• Η, η - Eta (Greek)
• Х, х - Kha (Cyrillic)

[edit] References

The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter H with diacritics ĤĥȞȟḦḧḢḣḨḩḤḥḪḫH̱ẖĦħⱧⱨ Two-letter combinations Ha Hb Hc Hd He Hf Hg Hh Hi Hj Hk Hl Hm Hn Ho Hp Hq Hr Hs Ht Hu Hv Hw Hx Hy Hz HA HB HC HD HE HF HG HH HI HJ HK HL HM HN HO HP HQ HR HS HT HU HV HW HX HY HZ Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations     H0 H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 H6 H7 H8 H9     0H 1H 2H 3H 4H 5H 6H 7H 8H 9H     history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646