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54-605: H , or h , is the eighth letter of 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 / eɪ tʃ / , plural aitches ), or regionally haitch / h eɪ tʃ / , plural haitches. For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as / eɪ tʃ / and spelled "aitch" or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation / h eɪ tʃ / and

108-411: A multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,

162-475: A hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent. The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982, and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, the pronunciation without

216-513: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in

270-415: 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'

324-549: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c.  1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from

378-540: A fence or posts. The Greek Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets , before coming to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/ , still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ . In this context, the letter eta is also known as Heta . Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets , the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/ . While Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as

432-413: A given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants , but some allophones occur in free variation . Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as

486-497: A phoneme must be pronounced using a specific allophone in a specific situation or whether the speaker has the unconscious freedom to choose the allophone that is used. If a specific allophone from a set of allophones that correspond to a phoneme must be selected in a given context, and using a different allophone for a phoneme would cause confusion or make the speaker sound non-native, the allophones are said to be complementary . The allophones then complement each other, and one of them

540-525: A single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes. The term "allophone" was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf circa 1929. In doing so, he is thought to have placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory. The term was popularized by George L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within

594-452: A single phoneme. These descriptions are more sequentially broken down in the next section. Peter Ladefoged , a renowned phonetician , clearly explains the consonant allophones of English in a precise list of statements to illustrate the language behavior. Some of these rules apply to all the consonants of English; the first item on the list deals with consonant length, items 2 through 18 apply to only selected groups of consonants, and

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648-437: A voiced environment. In Hungarian , the letter represents a phoneme / h / with four allophones: [ h ] before vowels, [ ɦ ] between two vowels, [ ç ] after front vowels , and [ x ] word-finally after back vowels . It can also be a silent word-finally after back vowels. It is [ xː ] when geminated. In archaic spelling, the digraph ⟨ch⟩ represents / t͡ʃ / (as in

702-403: A voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example, the word ⟨hit⟩ , /hɪt/ is realized as [ɪ̥ɪt]. H is the eighth most frequently used letter in the English language (after S , N , I , O , A , T , and E ), with a frequency of about 6.1% in words. In German , following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen ('heighten'),

756-747: Is assimilation , in which a phoneme is to sound more like another phoneme. One example of assimilation is consonant voicing and devoicing , in which voiceless consonants are voiced before and after voiced consonants, and voiced consonants are devoiced before and after voiceless consonants. An allotone is a tonic allophone, such as the neutral tone in Standard Mandarin . There are many allophonic processes in English: lack of plosion, nasal plosion, partial devoicing of sonorants, complete devoicing of sonorants, partial devoicing of obstruents, lengthening and shortening vowels, and retraction. Because

810-579: 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. In English, ⟨h⟩ occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing the voiceless glottal fricative / h / and in various digraphs : The letter

864-612: 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⟩

918-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have

972-464: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Allophone In phonology , an allophone ( / ˈ æ l ə f oʊ n / ; from

1026-449: Is not used in a situation in which the usage of another is standard. For complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context and may be involved in a phonological process. In other cases, the speaker can freely select from free-variant allophones on personal habit or preference, but free-variant allophones are still selected in the specific context, not the other way around. Another example of an allophone

1080-412: Is often omitted in all words. 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 historian", but the use of a is now more usual. In English, the pronunciation of ⟨h⟩ as /h/ can be analyzed as a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as

1134-564: Is silent in a syllable rime , as in ah , ohm , dahlia , cheetah , and 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 (in certain varieties of English). 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

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1188-646: Is used to represent aspiration . Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859, and Macintosh families of encodings. [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes , the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called

1242-432: The /h/ sound is still considered standard in England, although the pronunciation with /h/ is also attested as a legitimate variant. 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. Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says

1296-464: The Greek ἄλλος , állos , 'other' and φωνή , phōnē , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones  – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive [ t ] (as in stop [ˈstɒp] ) and the aspirated form [ tʰ ] (as in top [ˈtʰɒp] ) are allophones for

1350-529: The 1970s, a compromise was reached that h would be accepted if it were the first consonant in a syllable. Hence, herri ("people") and etorri ("to come") were accepted instead of erri ( Biscayan ) and ethorri ( Souletin ). As a phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it is used mainly for the so-called aspirations (fricative or trills), and variations of the plain letter are used to represent two sounds:

1404-485: The American structuralist tradition. Whenever a user's speech is vocalized for a given phoneme, it is slightly different from other utterances, even for the same speaker. That has led to some debate over how real and how universal phonemes really are (see phoneme for details). Only some of the variation is significant, by being detectable or perceivable, to speakers. There are two types of allophones, based on whether

1458-524: 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

1512-645: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c.  3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c.  1800 BCE , representing

1566-479: 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 the lenition of that consonant; ⟨h⟩ began to replace

1620-785: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c.  900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet

1674-419: The allophones is simple to transcribe, in the sense of not requiring diacritics, that representation is chosen for the phoneme. However, there may be several such allophones, or the linguist may prefer greater precision than that allows. In such cases, a common convention is to use the "elsewhere condition" to decide the allophone that stands for the phoneme. The "elsewhere" allophone is the one that remains once

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1728-404: 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 of [(h)a ka] for H . The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative ( ħ ). The form of the letter probably stood for

1782-404: The associated spelling "haitch" are often considered to be h-adding and are considered non-standard in England. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English , and occurs sporadically in various other dialects. The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an H-bomb" or "a H-bomb". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ may be

1836-452: The choice among allophones is seldom under conscious control, few people realize their existence. English-speakers may be unaware of differences between a number of (dialect-dependent) allophones of the phoneme /t/ : In addition, the following allophones of /t/ are found in (at least) some dialects of American(ised) English; However, speakers may become aware of the differences if – for example – they contrast

1890-497: The conditions for the others are described by phonological rules. For example, English has both oral and nasal allophones of its vowels. The pattern is that vowels are nasal only before a nasal consonant in the same syllable; elsewhere, they are oral. Therefore, by the "elsewhere" convention, the oral allophones are considered basic, and nasal vowels in English are considered to be allophones of oral phonemes. In other cases, an allophone may be chosen to represent its phoneme because it

1944-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage

1998-477: 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 . French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect

2052-629: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩

2106-426: The distinction. One may notice the (dialect-dependent) allophones of English /l/ such as the (palatal) alveolar "light" [l] of leaf [ˈliːf] as opposed to the velar alveolar "dark" [ɫ] in feel [ˈfiːɫ] found in the U.S. and Southern England. The difference is much more obvious to a Turkish -speaker, for whom /l/ and /ɫ/ are separate phonemes, than to an English speaker, for whom they are allophones of

2160-490: The last German spelling reform. In Spanish and Portuguese , ⟨h⟩ 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

2214-401: The last item deals with the quality of a consonant. These descriptive rules are as follows: There are many examples for allophones in languages other than English. Typically, languages with a small phoneme inventory allow for quite a lot of allophonic variation: examples are Hawaiian and Pirahã . Here are some examples (the links of language names go to the specific article or subsection on

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2268-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and

2322-470: The lowercase form ⟨ h ⟩ represents the voiceless glottal fricative , and the small capital form ⟨ ʜ ⟩ represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative (or trill). With a bar, minuscule ⟨ ħ ⟩ is used for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative . Specific to the IPA, a hooked ⟨ ɦ ⟩ is used for a voiced glottal fricative , and a superscript ⟨ ʰ ⟩

2376-436: The name Széchenyi ) and / h / (as in pech , which is pronounced [pɛxː] ); in certain environments it breaks palatalization of a consonant, as in the name Beöthy , which is pronounced [bøːti] (without the intervening h, the name Beöty could be pronounced [bøːc] ); and finally, it acts as a silent component of a digraph, as in the name Vargha, pronounced [vɒrgɒ] . In Ukrainian and Belarusian , when written in

2430-596: 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 Basque , during the 20th century, it was not used in the orthography of the Basque dialects in Spain but it marked an aspiration in the North-Eastern dialects. During the standardization of Basque in

2484-541: 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

2538-399: The phenomenon): Since phonemes are abstractions of speech sounds, not the sounds themselves, they have no direct phonetic transcription . When they are realized without much allophonic variation, a simple broad transcription is used. However, when there are complementary allophones of a phoneme, the allophony becomes significant and things then become more complicated. Often, if only one of

2592-497: The phoneme /t/ , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai . Similarly, in Spanish , [ d ] (as in dolor [doˈloɾ] ) and [ ð ] (as in nada [ˈnaða] ) are allophones for the phoneme /d/ , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English (as in the difference between dare and there ). The specific allophone selected in

2646-431: 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. 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⟩

2700-461: The pronunciations of the following words: A flame that is held in front of the lips while those words are spoken flickers more for the aspirated nitrate than for the unaspirated night rate. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin -speaker, for whom /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes, the English distinction is much more obvious than for an English-speaker, who has learned since childhood to ignore

2754-449: 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

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2808-439: The spellings of certain short words that are homophones , for example, some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno , 'they have', vs. anno , 'year'), and in short interjections ( oh , ehi ). 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

2862-465: 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 in the digraphs 'ch' /k/ and 'gh' /ɡ/ , as well as to differentiate

2916-508: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in

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