H&k Usp Spring Airsoft Pistol Black by Heckler & Koch

Letter of the Latin alphabet

H
H h
(Run into below)

Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic
Linguistic communication of origin	Latin linguistic communication
Phonetic usage	[h] [x] [ħ] [0̸] [ɦ] [ɥ] [ʜ] [ʔ] [◌ʰ] [ç]
Unicode codepoint	`U+0048, U+0068`
Alphabetical position	8
History
Evolution	Η η 𐌇 H h
Time menses	~-700 to present
Descendants	Ħ Ƕ Ⱶ Һ ʰ h ħ $\mathbb {H}$
Sisters	И Һ Ԧ ח ح ܚ ࠄ ࠇ 𐎅 𐎈 Հ հ
Variations	(Run into below)
Other
Other letters commonly used with	h(x), ch, gh, nh, ph, sh, ſh, thursday, wh, (x)h
This commodity contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Aid:IPA. For the distinction betwixt [ ], / / and ⟨⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

H, or h, is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its proper name in English is aitch (pronounced , plural aitches), or regionally haitch .^[1]

History

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

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

The Greek Eta 'Η' in primitive 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 as well known equally Heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original audio value /h/.

While Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian after re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, earlier losing it again; diverse Castilian dialects take adult [h] every bit an allophone of /due south/ or /x/ in nigh Spanish-speaking countries, and diverse dialects of Portuguese use it equally 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, Old Portuguese, and English; /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese; /thou/ in Italian, French, and English; /10/ in German language, Czech, Smoothen, Slovak, i native discussion of English, and a few loanwords into English; and /ç/ in German.

Proper noun in English

For most English speakers, the name for the letter of the alphabet is pronounced as and spelled "aitch"^[1] or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation and the associated spelling "haitch" is ofttimes considered to exist h-calculation and is considered nonstandard in England.^[two] It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English,^[iii] too as scattered varieties of Edinburgh, England, and Welsh English,^[iv] and in Commonwealth of australia and Nova Scotia.

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 a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.^[5]

The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English language people born since 1982,^[6] and polls continue to show this pronunciation condign more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, the pronunciation without the /h/ sound is still considered to exist standard in England, although the pronunciation with /h/ is also attested as a legitimate variant.^[2]

Authorities disagree about the history of the alphabetic character's proper name. The Oxford English Lexicon says the original name of the letter was [ˈaha] in Latin; this became [ˈaka] in Vulgar Latin, passed into English language via Quondam French [atʃ], and by Middle English was pronounced [aːtʃ]. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Linguistic communication derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of 2 obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any Thou: reciting the former'due south ..., H, Thousand, L,... as [...(h)a ka el ...] when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation [(h)a ka] for H.^[7]

Employ in writing systems

English language

In English, ⟨h⟩ occurs as a single-letter character (being either silent or representing the voiceless glottal fricative () and in various digraphs, such as ⟨ch⟩ , , , or ), ⟨gh⟩ (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), ⟨ph⟩ (/f/), ⟨rh⟩ (/r/), ⟨sh⟩ (), ⟨th⟩ ( or ), ⟨wh⟩ (/hw/ ^[eight]). The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, as well equally in certain other words (mostly of French origin) such equally hour, honest, herb (in American merely not British English) and vehicle (in certain varieties of English language). Initial /h/ is oftentimes not pronounced in the weak form of some part words including had, has, have, he, her, him, his, and in some varieties of English (including most regional dialects of England and Wales) information technology is often omitted in all words (run across '⟨h⟩'-dropping). Information technology was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the indefinite article before a word commencement with /h/ in an unstressed syllable, as in "an historian", only use of a is at present more usual (run into English articles § Indefinite article). In English language, The pronunciation of ⟨h⟩ as /h/ can be analyzed every bit a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example the word ⟨hit⟩, /hɪt/ is realized equally [ɪ̥ɪt].^[9] H is the 8th most oft used letter in the English language (after S, N, I, O, A, T, and E), with a frequency of nigh 4.two% in words.^{[ citation needed ]} When h is placed after sure other consonants, it modifies their pronunciation in various ways, e.grand. for ch, gh, ph, sh, and thursday.

Other languages

In the High german language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the discussion erhöhen ('heighten'), the second ⟨h⟩ is mute for nigh speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ⟨h⟩ in almost 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 every bit 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 " in Spanish, pronounced ['atʃe], or agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈɡa]) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, every bit 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/, information technology is still sometimes pronounced with the value [h] in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias, Cantabria, and the Americas. Some words get-go with [je] or [we], such every bit hielo , 'water ice' and huevo , 'egg', were given an initial ⟨h⟩ to avoid defoliation between their initial semivowels and the consonants ⟨j⟩ and ⟨5⟩. This is because ⟨j⟩ and ⟨5⟩ used to be considered variants of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively. ⟨h⟩ besides 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 virtually of the Portuguese language and some Spanish dialects, prominently Chilean Castilian.

In French, the name of the letter is written as "ache" and pronounced /aʃ/. The French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter of the alphabet in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter of the alphabet either way. The H muet, or "mute" ⟨h⟩, is considered equally though the letter were non there at all, and so for case the atypical definite commodity le or la, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides earlier 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 non normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For example in le homard ('the lobster') the commodity le remains unelided, and may exist 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 nearly words beginning with an H aspiré come up 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 stardom between the messages ⟨5⟩ 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 virtually of import uses are in the digraphs 'ch' /chiliad/ and 'gh' /ɡ/, every bit well as to differentiate the spellings of sure short words that are homophones, for case some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to take') (such every bit hanno, 'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), and in short interjections (oh, ehi).

Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian apply ⟨h⟩ every bit a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], ofttimes equally an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Hungarian, the letter has no fewer than five pronunciations, with three additional uses as a productive and non-productive chemical element of digraphs. The letter h may represent /h/ as in the proper noun of the Székely boondocks Hargita; intervocalically it represents /ɦ/ every bit in tehén; information technology represents /x/ in the word doh; it represents /ç/ in ihlet; and information technology is silent in cseh. Every bit part of a digraph, information technology represents, in archaic spelling, /t͡ʃ/ with the alphabetic character c as in the name Széchenyi; it represents, again, with the alphabetic character c, /x/ 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 equally a silent component of a digraph, as in the name Vargha, pronounced [vɒrgɒ].

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

In Irish, ⟨h⟩ is not considered an contained 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 class of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, afterward the introduction of typewriters.

In near dialects of Polish, both ⟨h⟩ and the digraph ⟨ch⟩ e'er represent /ten/.

In Basque, during the 20th century it was non 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 the 1970s, the compromise was reached that h would exist accustomed if it were the start consonant in a syllable. Hence, herri ("people") and etorri ("to come") were accepted instead of erri (Biscayan) and ethorri (Souletin). Speakers could pronounce the h or not. For the dialects lacking the aspiration, this meant a complication added to the standardized spelling.

Other systems

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: the lowercase form ⟨h⟩ represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital course ⟨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⟩ is used to correspond aspiration.

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

H with diacritics: Ĥ ĥ Ȟ ȟ Ħ ħ Ḩ ḩ Ⱨ ⱨ ẖ ẖ Ḥ ḥ Ḣ ḣ Ḧ ḧ Ḫ ḫ ꞕ Ꜧ ꜧ
IPA-specific symbols related to H: ʜ ꟸ ɦ ʰ ʱ ɥ ᶣ ^[10]
ᴴ : Modifier letter H is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet^[xi]
ₕ : Subscript small h was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902^[12]
ʰ : Modifier alphabetic character modest h is used in Indo-European studies^[13]
ʮ and ʯ : Turned H with fishhook and turned H with fishhook and tail are used in Sino-Tibetanist linguistics^[14]
Ƕ ƕ : Latin letter of the alphabet hwair, derived from a ligature of the digraph hv, and used to transliterate the Gothic letter of the alphabet 𐍈 (which represented the sound [hʷ])
Ⱶ ⱶ : Claudian letters^[xv]
Ꟶ ꟶ : Reversed half h used in Roman inscriptions from the Roman provinces of Gaul^[16]

Ancestors, siblings, and descendants in other alphabets

𐤇 : Semitic letter of the alphabet Heth, from which the following symbols derive
- Η η : Greek letter Eta, from which the following symbols derive
  - 𐌇 : Onetime Italic H, the ancestor of modernistic Latin H
    - ᚺ, ᚻ : Runic letter haglaz, which is probably a descendant of Erstwhile Italic H
  - Һ һ : Cyrillic letter Shha, which derives from Latin H
  - И и : Cyrillic letter И, which derives from the Greek letter Eta
  - 𐌷 : Gothic letter haal

Derived signs, symbols, and abbreviations

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

Calculating codes

Character data
Preview	H		h
Unicode proper name	LATIN Capital LETTER H		LATIN SMALL Letter of the alphabet H
Encodings	decimal	hex	december	hex
Unicode	72	U+0048	104	U+0068
UTF-8	72	48	104	68
Numeric character reference	H	H	h	h
EBCDIC family	200	C8	136	88
ASCII ⁱ	72	48	104	68

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859, and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

Encounter also

American Sign Linguistic communication grammar
Listing of Egyptian hieroglyphs#H

References

^ ^a ^b "H" Oxford English Lexicon, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Lexicon of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch" or "haitch", op. cit.
^ ^a ^b "'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?". BBC News. Archived from the original on 12 October 2016. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
^ Dolan, T. P. (1 January 2004). A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English. Gill & Macmillan Ltd. ISBN9780717135356. Archived from the original on 17 January 2017. Retrieved iii September 2016 – via Google Books.
^ Vaux, Bert. The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes Archived 24 May 2019 at the Wayback Machine. University of Cambridge.
^ Todd, L. & Hancock I.: "International English Ipod", page 254. Routledge, 1990.
^ John C. Wells, Longman Pronunciation Lexicon, page 360, Pearson, Harlow, 2008
^ Liberman, Anatoly (7 Baronial 2013). "Alphabet soup, part 2: H and Y". Oxford Etymologist. Oxford University Printing. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
^ In many dialects, /hw/ and /w/ take merged
^ "phonology - Why is /h/ chosen voiceless vowel phonetically, and /h/ consonant phonologically?". Linguistics Stack Exchange. Archived from the original on v May 2019. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
^ Constable, Peter (19 April 2004). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on xi October 2017. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
^ Everson, Michael; et al. (20 March 2002). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 February 2018. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
^ Ruppel, Klaas; Aalto, Tero; Everson, Michael (27 January 2009). "L2/09-028: Proposal to encode additional characters for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on eleven Oct 2017. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
^ Anderson, Deborah; Everson, Michael (vii June 2004). "L2/04-191: Proposal to encode six Indo-Europeanist phonetic characters in the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on eleven October 2017. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
^ Cook, Richard; Everson, Michael (twenty September 2001). "L2/01-347: Proposal to add six phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 Oct 2017. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
^ Everson, Michael (12 August 2005). "L2/05-193R2: Proposal to add Claudian Latin letters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 June 2019. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
^ West, Andrew; Everson, Michael (25 March 2019). "L2/19-092: Proposal to encode Latin Letter Reversed Half H" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 13 June 2019. Retrieved 17 March 2020.

External links

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