h¹

 

8th letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a glottal spirant, murmured (as in the English house) or voiceless (as in the English herb). In some Greek alphabets eta, the long e, had this form. In chemistry H is the symbol for the element hydrogen.

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 English is spelled aitch,^[1] pronounced IPA /eɪtʃ/ in most dialects, though in Irish and Indian English it is generally haitch /heɪtʃ/. (See the discussion below on the two pronunciations.)

See alphabet

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) probably represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA /ħ/). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence. 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 EA /ɛː/ and EE /eː/ came to be both pronounced /i:/.)

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, but 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/.

Usage in English

Pronunciation

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelt 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. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch.^[2] 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 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. 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/.

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/), 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 some words of Romance origin:

• Initially in heir, honest, honour, hour; for American English usually also herb, and sometimes homage.
• 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).
• At the end of a word, as cheetah, verandah.

H is often silent in the weak form of some function words beginning with H, including had, has, have, he, her, him, his.

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", 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 the word Thron "throne", which continues to be spelled in this way, 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

In Unicode the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lowercase 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.

Hexadecimal

Some programming languages use "h" or "H" to mark Hexadecimal numbers. This can either be as a suffix, such as 05h, pronounced "five hex" or FFH "pronounced eff, eff, hex"^{[citation needed]} or as a prefix, such as H'46' in Microchip MPASM assembly. However, there are also other standards that use different letters, such as "0x" in C.

In all of the above cases, it can also be described with the radix first, for example "hex forty-six", is the same as "forty-six hex".

See also

• ĥ
• ħ
• Eta

References

1. ^ "H" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch," op. cit.
2. ^ The Association for Scottish Literary Studies

The 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
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

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