H

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 eta ‹Η› represented /h/, but later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/. In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where Middle English /ɛː/ and /eː/ came to be both pronounced /iː/.

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled ‹aitch› or occasionally ‹eitch›. The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and hence a spelling of ‹haitch› is often considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English 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; this may be traced back to the disenfranchising of Irish Catholics by Protestant Anglo-Irish. The Irish Catholics were barred from any positions of power resulting in poor education. In both Canada[citation needed] and Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching. 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.

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.

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 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 ‹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 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).

[ see less ]