H

ISO 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

Cursive script 'h' and capital 'H'

H (named aitch /ˈeɪtʃ/, plural aitches;^[1] or haitch /ˈheɪtʃ/ in especially Hiberno-English)^{[citation needed]} is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph  fence	Old Semitic ħ	Phoenician heth	Greek heta	Etruscan H	Latin H

The Semitic letter 'ח' ('ê') most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.

The Greek eta 'Η' in the Archaic period still represented /h/ (later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/). 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/.

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, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as 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, Old Portuguese and English, /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, /x/ in German, Czech, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English and a few loanwords into English, and /ç/ in German.

Name in English

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/ and spelled 'aitch'^[1] or occasionally 'eitch'. The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ and hence a spelling of 'haitch' is often 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, Newfoundland, 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 and is estimated to be in use by 60% of the population.^[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 /ˈheɪtʃ/ 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]

The non-standard haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982^[6] and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, careful speakers of English continue to pronounce aitch in the standard way, although the non-standard pronunciation is also attested as a legitimate variant.^[7]

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was [ˈaha]; this became [ˈaka] in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French [ˈatʃ], and by Middle English was pronounced [ˈaːtʃ]. 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, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative. A superscript [ʰ] is used to represent aspiration.

In English, 'h' occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing /h/) and in various digraphs, such as 'ch' (/tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), 'gh' (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), 'ph' (/f/), 'rh' (/r/), 'sh' (/ʃ/), 'th' (/θ/ or /ð/), 'wh' (/hw/^[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. 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). 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 hotel", but use of a is now more usual (see English articles: Indefinite article).

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'), only the first 'h' represents /h/. 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 ('theater') and Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with 'th' even after the last German spelling reform.

In Spanish and Portuguese, 'h' ("hache" in Spanish, agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈga]) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] ('son') and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] ('Hungarian'). 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/ as in Andalusian esto [ˈɛht̪ɔ] ('this'), or as a dialectal realization of /x/, as in Puerto Rican caja [ˈkaha] ('box'). It also is pronounced sometimes in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias and the Americas in the beginning of some words as harina, hartar, herida or hacer. In nearly all of Brazil, [h] also appears as allophone of the phoneme /ʁ/, but its usage is minoritarian and is generally found in variation with other, non-glottal, possibilities in most of the country except some Northern and Northeastern speech, and of coda /s/, with a limited colloquial use (most prominently in Rio de Janeiro, but even there it is much lesser than nearly anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world). 'H' also appears in the digraph 'ch', which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and hinterland northern Portugal, and /ʃ/ in oral traditions that merged both sounds (the latter originarily represented by 'x' instead) e.g. in most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish-speaking places, prominently Chile, as well 'nh' /ɲ/ and 'lh' /ʎ/ in Portuguese, such spelling inherited from Occitan.

In French, 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); 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).

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

Some languages, including 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'.

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

In most dialects of Polish, both 'h' and the digraph 'ch' always represent /x/.

The Russian language has no /h/ sound and there is no letter to represent this sound in the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet.^[9] In transliterations the letter 'x' (pronounced as /x/) is used, as in Хэмпшир for "Hampshire", although in some longer established names 'г' (pronounced /g/) appears, as in Генрих for "Henry".

Related letters and other similar characters

• Н н : Cyrillic letter En
• Η η : Greek letter Eta
• Ĥ ĥ : Latin letter H with circumflex
• Ħ ħ : Latin letter H with stroke
• ℎ : Planck constant
• ℏ : reduced Planck constant

Computing codes

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

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Hotel	····

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

See also

• American Sign Language grammar
• List of hieroglyphs/H

References

External links

• Media related to H at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of H at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of h at Wiktionary