H

For other uses of "H", see "H" (disambiguation).

H is the 8th letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English is spelled h (Template:PronEng) in most dialects, though in Irish, Singaporean, South Indian English and very occasionally British English it is haitch /heɪtʃ/. (See the discussion below on the two pronunciations.) 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.

History

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

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

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, then lost it again, and Castilian /x/ has developed an [h] allophone in some Spanish-speaking countries. In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as the phoneme /h/. This may be because /h/ was sometimes lost between vowels in German, but it may also have to do with the fact that Romance lost /h/. Hence, H is used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English /tʃ/, French /ʃ/ from /tʃ/, Italian /k/, German /χ/, Czech and Slovak /x/.

Usage in English

Pronunciation

The letter H is the 8th letter in our alphabet. In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled aitch [1] (or occasionally eitch). Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ (and hence spelling haitch) is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. However it is standard in Hiberno-English, Singaporean English, and Indian English. Haitch is also used in parts of Northern England. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. The pronunciation 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.

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, from which it can be argued that the pronunciation /eɪtʃ/ is a result of h-dropping.

Value

H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value /h/ or silent) and in various digraphs, such as ch (/tʃ/, French /ʃ/, Greek and Italian /k/, German & Scots /x/), gh (silent, /g/, or /f/) , ph (Greek words with /f/), rh (Greek words with /r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (either /θ/ like thin or /ð/ like then), wh (either /w/, /ʍ/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 rendition 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 "an historic occasion"; to retain the "an" and pronounce the H may be considered affected.
• After ex when x has value /gz/, as exhaust.
• For many speakers, after a stressed vowel and before an unstressed, as annihilate, vehicle (but not vehicular).

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 [h] did exist. 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 [ˈkaha] 'box' ).

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 masculine nouns get the article le replaced by the sequence l'. Similarly, words such as un, whose pronunciation would elide onto the following word would do so for a word with h muet.

For example Le hébergement becomes L'hébergement.

The other way is called h aspiré, or "aspirated h" (though it is still not aspirated) and is treated as a phantom consonant. Hence masculine nouns get the le, separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. There is no elision with such a word; the preceding word is kept separate by similar means.

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). As is generally the case with French, there are numerous exceptions. In some cases, an h muet was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations: 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.

Dictionaries mark those words that have this second kind of h with a preceding mark, either an asterisk, a dagger, or a little circle lower than a degree-symbol.

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] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) "heighten", only the first <h> represents /h/. This is the origin of the spelling (or pronunciation) of the English utterance "Eh?" which is not at all like an English pronunciation of the letter "e".

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] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) "theater" and [Thron] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) "throne", which continue to be spelled with <th> even after the last German spelling reform.

Usage in other languages

Some languages, including, but not limited to, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Hungarian and Finnish use H as a voiced glottal fricative [ɦ].

In Ukrainian and Belarusian it's rendered with the letter Г (note its difference from Russian pronunciation and romanisation).

In computing

Codes

class="template-letter-box | 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.

See also

• ĥ
• ħ
• Eta