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For the element Hydrogen for H, see Hydrogen. The letter H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is aitch , or in some dialects haitch . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Its lowercase form, , represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and its small capital form, , represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.
History The Semitic letter ח () probably represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence. The early Greek H stood for , but later on, this letter, eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, . (In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with , similar to the English development where EA and EE came to be both pronounced .) Etruscan and Latin had as a phoneme, but all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary from F, then lost it again, and Castilian has developed an allophone in some Spanish-speaking countries. In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as the phoneme . This may be because was sometimes lost between vowels in German, but it may also have to do with the fact that Romance lost . Hence, H is used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English , French from , Italian , German . Name of the letter The English name of the letter is generally pronounced and spelled aitch* (or occasionally eitch). Pronunciation (and hence spelling haitch) is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard, however it is standard in Hiberno-English, and among Saint-Léonard Italians in Montreal. It is common in Australian English, often identified with those educated by Irish emigrants in Catholic schools. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. The pronunciation 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 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 pronunciation. The American Heritage Dictionary® of the English Language derives the letter's name from French hache from Latin haca or hic, from which it can be argued that the pronunciation is a result of h-dropping. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was ; this became in Latin, passed into English via Old French , and by Middle English was pronounced . Value H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value or silent) and in the 2-letter graphemes ch(, French , Greek and Italian ), gh (silent, , or ) , ph (Greek words with ), rh (Greek words with ), sh (), th (either or ), wh (either or : see wine-whine merger). In transliterations from Russian, zh may occur for . H is silent in some words of Romance origin: Usage in French 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 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 plus Hébergement (accommodation) 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) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe) or non-Indo-European languages(harem, hamac). As is generally the case with French, there are numerous exceptions. In some cases, an h muet was added to disambiguate the and semivowel 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 . 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 In 1901, there was a spelling reform which eliminated the silent in native German words such as Thee or Neanderthal. Due to opposition by monarchists, the word Thron "throne" was exempted from this and left with | . | Codes for computing 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 "& Meanings for H See also sn:H yo:H | ||||||||
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