H is the eighth letter in the
basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in both
British and
American English is aitch"H" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch", op. cit. (), plural aitches, though it is also pronounced haitch in some dialects (see the discussion
below).
History
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below).
History
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History
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below).
History
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below).
History
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History
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History
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History
{| border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse;text-align:center;"|- bgcolor="#EEEEEE"! Egyptian hieroglyph fence! Proto-Semitic! Phoenician
heth! Etruscan H! Greek
Eta|-----|N24|
|
|
|
|}The Semitic letter ח () most likely represented the
voiceless pharyngeal fricative (). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early
Greek H stood for , but later on, this letter,
eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, . In Modern Greek, this
phoneme has merged with , similar to the English
development where Middle English ea and ee came to be both pronounced .
Etruscan and
Latin had as a
phoneme, but almost all
Romance languages lost the sound—
Romanian later re-borrowed the phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and
Spanish developed a secondary from F, before losing it again, and now has developed an
allophone of in some Spanish-speaking countries. H is also used in many spelling systems in
digraphs and
trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English , French and Portuguese from , Italian , German , Czech and Slovak .
Name in English
In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced and spelled aitch or occasionally eitch. Pronunciation and hence a spelling of haitch is usually considered to be
h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of
Hiberno-English A dictionary of Hiberno-English, Terence Patrick Dolan page 118, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004 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.
In Newfoundland, the pronunciation is /heɪtʃ/. The Association for Scottish Literary StudiesIn
Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching.
Ab(h)ominable (H)aitch by Frederick Ludowyk, Australian National Dictionary Centre 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 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.Todd, L. & Hancock I.: "International English Usage", page 254. Routledge, 1990.
Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The
Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was ; this became in Latin, passed into English via Old French , and by Middle English was pronounced .
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic.
Usage
In the
International Phonetic Alphabet, variations of the letter are used to represent two sounds. The lowercase form, , represents the
voiceless glottal fricative or 'aspirate', and the small capital form, , represents the
voiceless epiglottal fricative.
In English, H occurs as a single-letter
grapheme (with value or
silent) and in various
digraphs, such as ch (, , , or ), gh (silent, , or ) , ph (), rh (), sh (), th ( or ), wh (, ). 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; and in some words of
Romance origin and, for some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as in "an historic occasion", "an hotel".
In the
German language, the name of the letter is pronounced . Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word "heighten", only the first <h> represents . 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 "theater" and "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 hijo ('son'), hola ('hello'), and hoje ('today'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound . The sound exists in a number of dialects in Spanish, either as a syllable-final allophone of (for example Andalusia, Argentina or Cuba - vg. esto "this", or as a dialectal realization of Standard (for example Mexican caja "box"). The letter H also appears in the digraph ch, pronounced in Spanish and in Portuguese.
In the French language, the name of the letter is pronounced . 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); in some cases, an h was added to disambiguate the and semivowel 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 real
phonological value. It is rather a
diacritic grapheme. The most important uses are to differentiate certain short words, for example some
present tense forms of the verb avere "to have", in short
interjections, and in the
digraphs ch and gh .
Some languages, including
English,
Czech,
Slovak,
Hungarian and
Finnish, use H as a
breathy voiced glottal fricative , 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 , 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.
Codes for computing
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 "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
References
Latin letters
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