(UK) Why do some people pronounce the letter H as haitch when in the dictionary it’s actually spelt aitch?

Answer 1

Yes, that's one of my bugbares! That's another for my room 101!!

Answer 2

Quite simply because they are fools. It drives me round the bl**dy twist.

One of my friends once claimed that "people who don't say 'haitch' are just dropping their haitches." Stupid, but still very funny.

'Haitch' might be more sensible and logical, but it's still just wrong.

(To the person above, from Hull - I went to uni in Hull, so you have my full understanding and deepest sympathy. If I heard one more person say "er, nerr" instead of ''oh, no'', I would have had to go on a murderous rampage.

To the other person above complaining about 'schedule' and 'school' - the English language isn't exactly logical, is it?! You spell 'cough' and 'bough' the same, they're not pronounced the same.Our language is full of such nonsense so it's pointless arguing that pronunciation is not logical. Even though you're right.)

Answer 3

I thought the letter H is spelt in the dictionary as H? Anyway, I see the logic as H is pronounced at the start of "haitch", where as "aitch" doesn't really represent the sound of the letter.

Why do the Americans call Z "zee" when that sound be easily confused with C?

Answer 4

well, once upon a time we were invaded by the normans (french) and the letter H as we know in france does not have a sound....so Haitch became aitch.....unfortunately as time has gone by and our education system has faultered and phonetics has gained popularity many people are now led to believe that you should pronounce it Haitch...at the same time exhailing their halitosis breath onto any poor passer by.

Answer 5

If your purpose is to have your son or daughter becomes proficient in studying equally money and lowercase letters. Then you definitely will be needing this program, Children Learning Reading from here https://tr.im/DrvNN .
Children Learning Reading teaches your child phonemes therefore they've a really stable basis in the abilities which will let them to go on to be a prolific reader. With Children Learning Reading will also focuses on making on the skills trained allowing your child to get their reading skills to the next level.
With Children Learning Reading is simple to show your youngster how to read.

Answer 6

It is sooooo annoying too. Here in Hull they say Haitch and Ull. Makes people sound common.

Answer 7

Lack of education as some are prone to saying SHEDULE rather than schedule pronounced SKEDULE. I went to school not to a SHOOL. Just the way some also say chimley...what is a CHIMLEY ???? I always thought it was CHIMNEY..I am still looking to see what American dictionary has this odd word in it. It must be the new world way of speaking.

Answer 8

For the same reason that some say the letter J as "Jie" instead of "Jay".

Its annoying isnt it.

Answer 9

Because nearly all other letters (W is the only other exception and some people do say wubbleyou) have their sound in the name.

Haitch would be much more sensible.

Answer 10

according to Wikipedia :-
The letter H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is aitch [eɪtʃ], or in some dialects haitch [heɪtʃ].

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.

Egyptian hieroglyph "fence" Proto-Semitic ħ Phoenician ħ Etruscan H Greek (H)eta




The Semitic letter ח (ḥêṯ) 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), became a long vowel, /ɛː/. (In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where EA /ɛː/ and EE /eː/ came to be both pronounced /i:/.)

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, but all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F, 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 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 /χ/.


[Name of the letter
The English name of the letter is generally pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled aitch[1] (or occasionally eitch). Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ (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 Roman 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 /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.

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 /eɪtʃ/ is a result of h-dropping. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was /aha/; this became /aka/ in Latin, passed into English via Old French /atʃ/, and by Middle English was pronounced /aːtʃ/.

H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value /h/ or silent) and in the 2-letter graphemes ch(/tʃ/, French /ʃ/, Greek and Italian /k/), gh (silent, /g/, or /f/) , ph (Greek words with /f/), rh (Greek words with /r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (either /θ/ or /ð/), wh (either /w/ or /ʍ/: see wine-whine merger). In transliterations from Russian, zh may occur for /ʒ/.

H is silent in some words of Romance origin:

Initially in heir, honest, honour, hour; for American English usually also herb, and sometimes homage.
For some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as "an historic occasion"; to retain the "an" and pronounce the H may be considered affected.
After ex when x has value /gz/, as exhaust.
For many speakers, after a stressed vowel and before an unstressed, as annihilate, vehicle (but not vehicular).
At the end of a word, as cheetah, verandah.

[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.

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 [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.

I though that you all might like to know that !