H is the eighth letter in the
basic modern Latin alphabetThe Modern basic Latin alphabet is a Latin-derived alphabet and comprises 26 letters. It is codified in ISO/IEC 646 and in the "Basic Latin" range for the Latin characters in Unicode. The upper case is at 0041-005A, lower at 0061-007A...
. Its name in both
BritishBritish English, or UK English or English English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...
and
American EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two thirds of native speakers of English live in the United States.English is the most common language in the United States...
is
aitch , plural
aitches, though it is also pronounced
haitch in some dialects (see the discussion below).
History
Egyptian hieroglyph
fence |
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Phoenician
hethHeth may refer to:* Heth , a letter in many Semitic alphabets* Children of Heth, a Canaanite nation in the Hebrew Bible, purportedly named after Heth, son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah* figures in the Book of Mormon:...
|
Etruscan
H |
Greek
Etaor ETA , is a terrorist, criminal, Basque nationalist and separatist organization. Founded in 1959, it evolved from a group advocating traditional cultural ways to a paramilitary group with the goal of independence for the greater Basque Country from a Marxist-Leninist perspective.Since 1968, ETA...
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The Semitic letter ח most likely represented the
voiceless pharyngeal fricativeThe voiceless pharyngeal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is h-bar , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is X\.-Features:...
. The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early
GreekThe Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to...
H stood for , but later on, this letter,
etaEta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8. Letters that arose from Eta include the Latin H and the Cyrillic letter И....
(Η, η), became a long vowel, . In Modern Greek, this
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
has merged with , similar to the English
developmentThe Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1450 and 1750....
where Middle English
ea and
ee came to be both pronounced .
EtruscanThe Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna , in Italy...
and
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
had as a
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
, but almost all
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
lost the sound—
RomanianRomanian or Daco-Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Republic of Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia...
later re-borrowed the phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and
SpanishSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
developed a secondary from F, before losing it again, and now has developed an
allophoneIn phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word...
of in some Spanish-speaking countries. H is also used in many spelling systems in
digraphsA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
and
trigraphsA trigraph is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined. For example, in the word schilling, the trigraph sch represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative , rather than the consonant cluster...
, 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-EnglishHiberno-English also known as Irish English is the dialect of English spoken in Ireland. The English language was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of Ireland in the late 12th century. However, due to England's inability to control the country, it was only spoken by a small...
and other varieties of English, such as
those of MalaysiaMalaysian English , formally known as Malaysian Standard English , is a form of English used and spoken in Malaysia as a second language...
and Singapore. In
Northern IrelandNorthern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and it is situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
it is a
shibbolethShibboleth is any distinguishing practice which is indicative of one's social or regional origin.It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group.-Origin:The term originates from...
as Protestant schools teach
aitch and Catholics
haitch.
In
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the continental mainland , the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
, 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 may be a
hypercorrectionIn linguistics, hypercorrection is defined as usage of pronunciation or linguistic rule that many informed users of a language consider incorrect, but that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of prescriptive rules, often combined with a desire to seem formal or educated.Linguistic...
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 DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language...
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 LanguageThe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is an American dictionary of the English language published by Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969...
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 fricativeThe voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "fricative", is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which often behaves like a consonant, but sometimes behaves more like a vowel, or is indeterminate in its behavior...
or 'aspirate', and the small capital form, , represents the
voiceless epiglottal fricativeThe voiceless epiglottal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is H\.-Features:...
.
In English, H occurs as a single-letter
graphemeA grapheme is a fundamental unit in a written language. Examples of graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems, although arguably a diacritical mark or ancillary glyph does not...
(with value or
silentIn an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. Silent letters create problems for both native and non-native speakers of a language, as they make it more difficult to guess the spellings of...
) and in various
digraphDigraph may refer to:* Digraph , a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
s, such as
ch ,
gh (silent, , or ) ,
ph ,
rh ,
sh ,
th ( or ),
wh . H is silent in a
syllable rimeIn the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
, as in
ah,
ohm,
dahlia,
cheetah,
pooh-poohed.
H is often silent in the
weak formIn the phonology of stress-timed languages, the weak form of a word is a form that may be used when the word has no stress, and which is phonemically distinct from the strong form, used when the word is stressed. The strong form serves as the citation 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 languageGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
, 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 reformMany languages have undergone spelling reform, where a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated, change to spelling takes place. Proposals for such reform are also common....
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
hábil ('skillful'). 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
articleAn article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun, and may also specify the volume or numerical scope of that reference. there are only three articles, a, an and and. The articles in the English language are the and a...
le or
la is
elidedIn French, elision refers to the suppression of a final unstressed vowel immediately before another word beginning with a vowel. The term also refers to the orthographic convention by which the deletion of a vowel is reflected in writing, and indicated with an apostrophe.- Written French :In...
to
l. For example, le + hébergement
becomes l'hébergement
"the accommodation". The other kind of h
is called h aspiré
("aspirated h
In French phonology and orthography, aspirated h is used to refer to words that begin with a vowel sound, but do not allow elision and liaison when they follow another word. Such words are usually spelled with an initial letter "h". For example:...
", 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 VV is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled vee.-The letter:The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
and UU is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled u; the plural is ues, though this is rare.-History:...
: huit
(from uit
, ultimately from Latin octo
), huître
(from uistre
, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea
).
In Italian H has no real phonologicalPhonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system...
value. It is rather a diacriticA diacritic is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective...
grapheme. The most important uses are to differentiate certain short words, for example some present tenseThe present tense is the tense that may be used to express:* action at the present* a state of being;* an occurrence in the near future; or* an action that occurred in the past and continues up to the present....
forms of the verb avere
"to have", in short interjections, and in the digraphsA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
ch
and gh .
Some languages, including
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
,
CzechCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian. - Official status :Czech is widely...
,
SlovakThe Slovak language , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages ....
,
HungarianHungarian is a Uralic language unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries...
and
FinnishFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken...
, use H as a
breathy voiced glottal fricativeThe breathy-voiced glottal transition, commonly called a voiced glottal fricative, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which often behaves like a consonant, but sometimes behaves more like a vowel, or is indeterminate in its behavior...
, often as an
allophoneIn phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word...
of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.
In
UkrainianUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet....
and
BelarusianThe Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusian people and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland...
, when written in the Latin alphabet, H is also commonly used for , normally written with the Cyrillic letter Г. (Note the difference from
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
pronunciation and romanisation).
In
IrishIrish is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now only spoken natively by a small minority of the Irish population but also plays an important symbolic role in the life of the Irish state, and is used...
H after a consonant indicates
lenitionLenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. Along with assimilation, it is one of the primary sources of historical change of languages....
of that consonant; it is known as a séimhiú.
Codes for computing
In
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lower case h is U+0068.
The
ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
code for capital H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; or in
binaryThe binary numeral system, or base-2 number system represents numeric values using two symbols, 0 and 1. More specifically, the usual base-2 system is a positional notation with a radix of 2...
01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.
The
EBCDICExtended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE, as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS...
code for capital H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136.
The
numeric character referenceA numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...
s in
HTMLHTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images...
and
XMLXML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the produced by the W3C and several other related specifications; all are fee-free open standards....
are "
H" and "
h" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
- ĥ
- ħ
- Н, н - En (Cyrillic)
En is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It represents the consonant unless followed by ь or any of the palatalizing vowels when it represents...
- Η, η - Eta (Greek)
Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8. Letters that arose from Eta include the Latin H and the Cyrillic letter И....
- Х, х - Kha (Cyrillic)
Kha, is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the voiceless velar fricative in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , except when followed by a palatalizing vowel, when it represents . It also represents the voiceless glottal fricative in Macedonian and some dialects of Serbian and...