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In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Its lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and its small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.
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History
The Semitic letter ח (khêt) 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) stood for /ɛ:/. In Modern Greek this phoneme fell together with /i/, similar to the English development where EA /ɛ:/ and EE /e:/ came to be both pronounced /i:/.
In Etruscan and Latin, the sound value /h/ was maintained, but all Romance languages lost the sound — subsequently Romanian borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F and 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 letter for 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 /x/.
Usage in English
In reference, it is spelled and pronounced as aitch (or sometimes, erroneously, as haitch by speakers of dialects—primarily Irish and Australian English—who pronounce an h in the name of the letter itself). The latter spelling is not standard English and is generally considered incorrect. The English name aitch /eɪtʃ/ or haitch /heɪtʃ/ derives from Old French /atʃ/ > Middle English /a:tʃ/; /heɪtʃ/ is thus a spelling pronunciation based on the sound usually associated with the English letter. Some dialects of English drop /h/ and instead include a glottal stop.
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.
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 (or "a" h muet, interestingly) 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 (harem, hamac) languages. 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, this letter is used in the digraph "ch" and the trigraph "sch" to indicate completely different sounds. Following a vowel, it silently indicates that the vowel is long. This is the origin of the spelling (or pronunciation) of the English ejaculation "Eh?" which is not at all like an English pronunciation of the letter "e".
Otherwise, it is pronounced at the start of words, but within a word itself, it is silent. Hohenzollern is an example (from dynastic history) in which the second h is not pronounced. This principle also pertains to compound words, such as Lufthansa.
A century ago, there was a spelling reform which eliminated the silent H in words such as Neanderthal; there was a controversy over removing it from Thron ("throne", honored by the monarchists).
Alternative representations
Hotel represents the letter H in the NATO phonetic alphabet. To ensure compatibility with those languages that do not pronounce this letter, this word is officially pronounced with the letter H silent.
In international Morse code the letter H is DitDitDitDit: · · · ·
In Braille the letter H is represented as ⠓ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,
X. XX ..
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 "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively.
Meanings for H
- In biochemistry, H is the symbol for histidine.
- In chemistry, H is the symbol for hydrogen.
- In computing:
- ^H is often used jokingly to indicate the intended deletion of the previous letter (see also W). This is because some operating systems use the control character ^H to delete the previous letter on a line.
- The file extension .h is used for C header files.
- H is an ITU-T series of recommendations on Audiovisual and multimedia systems and used in their names such as H.323. See ITU-T recommendations.
- In electromagnetism:
- H is the symbol for magnetic field strength.
- H is also the symbol for the SI derived unit for electric inductance: the henry.
- In English slang, H is a term for heroin, a recreational drug that is highly addictive.
- In Japanese, H was originally an abbreviation for "hentai" (pervert). It has come to mean sexual, as in H games (pornographic computer games) or H suru (meaning "to have sex"). Through the popularity of anime (Japanese animation), the old incorrect meaning has become known to fans in the west. See also Ecchi.
- In international licence plate codes, H stands for Hungary.
- In mathematics, blackboard bold <math>\mathbb{H}</math> represents the quaternions (after William Rowan Hamilton, <math>\mathbb{Q}</math> representing the rationals).
- In the SI system:
- In music, H is a note in the German system, corresponding to B natural.
- In physics, h is Planck's constant.
- In thermodynamics, h is enthalpy.
- H is the stage name of Ian Watkins, formerly of the pop group Steps.
- H is the nickname of Adrian Smith, guitarist for the heavy metal band Iron Maiden.
- As the first letter of a postal code:
- In science fiction fandom and hacker jargon, the infix of an h is a method of "marking" common words, i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard, ironic, or humorous way. It is likely to have originated in the fannish catch phrase “Bheer is the One True Ghod!” from the mid-20th Century. The h infix marking of "Ghod" and other words spread into the 1960s counterculture via underground comics, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three communities overlapped heavily at the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix.
See also
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bs:H ca:H sn:H cs:H da:H de:H el:H als:H es:H eo:H fr:H gl:H it:H kw:H la:H nl:H ja:H no:H pl:H pt:H ro:H simple:H sl:H to:H fi:H sv:H vi:H yo:H zh:H
