H

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Its lowercase form, {{IPA|}}, represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and its small capital form, {{IPA|}}, represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.

Usage in French

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.

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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.

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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 {{IPA|}} and semivowel {{IPA|}} pronunciations: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

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Some of these distinctions have been preserved in English through Anglo-French: an honour vs. a harp.

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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.

Related Topics:
Asterisk - Dagger

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