H

H
H h
Usage
Writing system	ħ $\mathbb {H}$
Sisters	𐎈 Հ հ
Other
Other letters commonly used with	h(x), ch, gh, nh, ph, sh, ſh, th, wh, (x)h
Writing direction	Left-to-Right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
v t e

H, or h, is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced /eɪtʃ/, plural aitches), or regionally haitch /heɪtʃ/.^[1]

History

Egyptian hieroglyph fence	Proto-Sinaitic ḥaṣr	Phoenician Heth	Greek Heta	Etruscan H	Latin H

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

The

While Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, 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 an 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, and Old Portuguese; /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese; /k/ in Italian and French.

Name in English

For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as /eɪtʃ/ and spelled "aitch"^[1] or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling "haitch" is often considered to be h-adding and is considered non-standard in England.^[2] It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English,^[3] and occurs sporadically in various other dialects.

The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of

The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982,[5] and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, the pronunciation without the /h/ sound is still considered to be standard in England, although the pronunciation with /h/ is also attested as a legitimate variant.^[2] In Northern Ireland, the pronunciation of the letter has been used as a shibboleth, with Catholics typically pronouncing it with the /h/ and Protestants pronouncing the letter without it.^[6]

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was [ˈaha] in Latin; this became [ˈaka] in Vulgar 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. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K: reciting the former's ..., H, K, L,... as [...(h)a ka el ...] when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation [(h)a ka] for H.^[7]

Use in writing systems

English

In English, ⟨h⟩ occurs as a single-letter

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'), the second ⟨h⟩ is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. 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 ['atʃe] in Spanish, agá [ɐˈɣa, aˈɡa] in Portuguese) 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/. In words where the ⟨h⟩ is derived from a Latin /f/, it is still sometimes pronounced with the value [h] in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias, Cantabria, and the Americas. Some words beginning with [je] or [we], such as hielo, 'ice' and huevo, 'egg', were given an initial ⟨h⟩ to avoid confusion between their initial semivowels and the consonants ⟨j⟩ and ⟨v⟩. This is because ⟨j⟩ and ⟨v⟩ used to be considered variants of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively. ⟨h⟩ also appears in the digraph ⟨ch⟩, which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and northern Portugal, and /ʃ/ in varieties that have merged both sounds (the latter originally represented by ⟨x⟩ instead), such as most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish dialects, prominently Chilean Spanish.

In French, the name of the letter is written as "ache" and pronounced /aʃ/. The French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, 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, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides before an H muet followed by a vowel. 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 does not allow elision or liaison. 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 orthographic ⟨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

Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian use ⟨h⟩ as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In

In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, ⟨h⟩ is also commonly used for /ɦ/, which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter ⟨г⟩.

In Irish, ⟨h⟩ is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words, however ⟨h⟩ placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates lenition of that consonant; ⟨h⟩ began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.

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

In

Other systems

As a phonetic symbol in the

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

• H with
  ꞕ Ꜧ ꜧ
• IPA-specific symbols related to H: ʜ ɦ ʰ ʱ ɥ ᶣ^[10] ɧ
• Superscript IPA symbols related to H:^[11] 𐞖 𐞕
• VoQS to represent faucalized voice
  .
• ᴴ : Modifier letter H is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet^[12]
• ₕ : Subscript small h was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902^[13]
• ʰ : Modifier letter small h is used in Indo-European studies^[14]
• ʯ : Turned H with fishhook and turned H with fishhook and tail are used in Sino-Tibetanist linguistics^[15]
• Ƕ ƕ : Latin letter hwair, derived from a ligature of the digraph hv, and used to transliterate the Gothic letter 𐍈 (which represented the sound [hʷ])
• Ⱶ ⱶ : Claudian letters^[16]
• Ꟶ ꟶ : Reversed half h used in Roman inscriptions from the Roman provinces of Gaul^[17]

Ancestors, siblings, and descendants in other alphabets

• 𐤇 : Semitic letter Heth, from which the following symbols derive
  • Η η :
    Eta
    , from which the following symbols derive
    • 𐌇 :
      Old Italic
      H, the ancestor of modern Latin H
      • ᚺ, ᚻ : Runic letter haglaz, which is probably a descendant of Old Italic H
    • Һ һ :
      Cyrillic letter Shha
      , which derives from Latin H
    • И и : Cyrillic letter
      Eta
    • 𐌷 : Gothic letter haal
    • Armenian letter ho (Հ)^{[citation needed]}

Derived signs, symbols, and abbreviations

• h : Planck constant
• ℏ :
  reduced Planck constant
• $\mathbb {H}$ : Blackboard bold capital H used in quaternion notation

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	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling )	Braille dots-125 Unified English Braille

See also

• Handshape
  • American Sign Language grammar
• List of Egyptian hieroglyphs#H

References

External links

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Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "H".

Wikimedia Commons has media related to H.

• The dictionary definition of H at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of h at Wiktionary
• Lubliner, Coby. 2008. "The Story of H." (essay on origins and uses of the letter "h")