Alphabetical (18 page)

Glossary: ‘aspirate' = making a breathing-out sound at the beginning of a word like ‘happy'; ‘glottal stop' = a speedy little constriction in the throat accompanied by an exhalation – a noise that can be the way some people pronounce ‘t' or ‘h' and
is sometimes represented in writing with an apostrophe, as in ‘bu'er' (butter), say.

Some people disapprove of glottals and non-aspirated Hs and call them ‘lazy'. Clearly, there is nothing lazy about constricting the back of your throat and producing a short, sharp exhalation. Because that particular way of producing sounds has been connected to people deemed to be of low status in society, the attitude that it's undesirable or lazy is nothing more or less than prejudice disguised as judgement.

Concerning the name of the letter itself: several observations are made about who says one rather than the other. More and more young people are saying ‘haitch'. The two variants used to follow the religious divide in Northern Ireland – ‘aitch' amongst Protestants, ‘haitch' amongst Catholics, mostly because that's how it was taught in the separate schools. Most schools in the Republic teach ‘haitch'.

The letter-name doesn't have a clear etymology. To fit in regularly with the other letters, we might expect it to be ‘hay' or ‘hee', but it needs saying: nothing in language is 100 per cent regular. ‘H' owes its name to the Normans who came in saying that it was ‘hache' or ‘ache' – perhaps because they too couldn't decide whether to aspirate the word or not. (If you can pronounce French, you'll know it as ‘ush'.) ‘Hache' is the origin of the English word ‘hatchet' and one theory is that this tool is described by the appearance of the lower-case ‘h'. The only other theory knocking around is that ‘hache' is derived from a Latin name that was never written down.

(The reason why etymologists can have theories like that is because not everything that the Romans said was written down and of course we have only written Roman, not spoken Roman, to go on. The Latin word for ‘horse' is ‘equus' but all over Europe where Romance languages are spoken, people have
versions of a word for ‘horse' that begins with a ‘c', has a ‘b' or ‘v' sound in the middle and an ‘l' sound at or towards the end. This suggests that there was a low-status word doing the rounds in Roman times – possibly ‘caballus' – but it was so low status it never made it into any piece of writing that has survived.)

Back with ‘h': given that the sound we associate with ‘h' is so slight (a little out-breath), it'll be no surprise to know that there has been some debate since at least
AD
500 whether it was a true letter or not. Letters and sounds are so imprinted into the heads of fluent readers, it's always hard to think round a question like this. We have to remember that when we write we do not indicate all the sounds or variations in sounds that we make. What's more: though we write letters one after the other, the sounds we make blend into each other. Think of ‘skew' or ‘trial'.

One consequence of using letters is that by themselves letters and combinations of letters cannot indicate variations in stress, rhythm and pitch. We leave it to musical notation to do that. If I were writing dialogue in a novel, and wanted to represent the end-of-phrase down-pitch of a Russian speaking English, or the end-of-phrase up-pitch of a young Australian, American or English person, I have no graphic way of representing that. ‘Loan words' sometimes survive in English with a trace of their origins: ‘lingerie' is now an English word and the ‘in' is usually given some kind of the nasalization that French people use though we have no way of indicating that. In other words, though there is an apparent precision about what sounds letters signify, on close examination it's all much more fluid than that. Most people do not say ‘linn-jer-ree'. They say something like ‘longzh-er-ee'. Our alphabet can't be that precise, particularly when it comes to loan words like ‘lingerie'.

So 1,500 years ago, Latin scholars noticed that what is peculiar about the breathy little sound of ‘h' is that it doesn't seem to be very distinct and that it overlaps with the next sound or even ‘colours' it. (We might ask ourselves why the ‘h' in ‘hoot' is pronounced differently from the ‘h' in ‘hew'?). As Latin evolved in France, people decided to drop saying the ‘h' altogether, just as we say ‘our' when we mean or read ‘hour'. Formal French demands that distinctions are made between the two types of non-pronounced ‘h'. Getting it wrong was something that lost us marks in our French conversation exam in 1964. I can't look at a green bean in a French supermarket without pondering on how to say ‘les haricots'. In French, this is not a matter of whether or not to make the out-breath sound of ‘h'. It's a matter of how you make the sound in front of the ‘h'. Is it ‘lay urry-co' or ‘laze urry-co'? Say the wrong one and you're doomed to ignominy. It's ‘lay urry-co'. Say ‘laze urry-co' and they'll think you're over-correcting and trying to sound better than you are. Like I said, doomed to ignominy and you won't deserve the beans.

In Britain, there have been centuries of dispute about it. The most up-to-date research suggests that some of the dialects in thirteenth-century England were h-dropping but by the time elocution experts came along in the eighteenth century, they were pointing out what a crime it is. Pause for one particular absurdity in this: when words such as ‘horrible', ‘habit' and ‘harmony' first came into English from French, they weren't pronounced with the ‘h' sound. Nor were they originally spelled with an ‘h'! Yet, for some, saying ‘'orrible' is an error. Second absurdity: some ‘dropped aitches' are more of a crime than others. ‘'Appy birthday' is seen as more distinctively cockney, lower class and undesirable than ‘could've' which almost all speakers say at some time or another. Of course, when people object to the way other people speak, it rarely has any linguistic
logic to it. It is nearly always because of the way that particular linguistic feature is seen to belong to a cluster of social features that are disliked. At times, this can get quite nasty. Over a hundred years ago, an adjective, ‘h-less', was in circulation and
The Times
and other polite newspapers used it to refer to such undesirables as ‘h-less Socialists' or the nouveau riche who made stacks of money but were still ‘h-less'.

If you want to imitate cockney or Jamaican speech, then one way to do it is to leave off the ‘h' in some words which are spelled with an ‘h', and to add an ‘h' to some words that have no initial ‘h'. Ted Johns, the tenants' leader on the Isle of Dogs in the East End of London, told me that when he was a boy in the 1930s, the class used to have to do elocution exercises in order to stamp out the ‘dropping of Hs'. ‘Be honest, humble and humane, hate not even your enemies,' they would chant. ‘Even now,' he told me in his fifties, ‘I get them muddled and say, “Be honest, 'umble and 'umane, 'ate not heven your henemies”.' Sticking ‘honest' in that exercise was a cruel move, because that's where English has retained the French ‘h', as with ‘heir' and ‘honour', and in US English ‘herb' and ‘homage' with not a breathy sound within hearshot, I mean earshot. Why couldn't all these French ‘h' words have been lumped in with ‘ostler' (meaning the man who works in a hostel) and ‘arbour' (once ‘herbier', the place where they grow grassy stuff)? Answer: because a lot of spelling – especially when it comes to the letter ‘h' – does not follow logic.

So ‘h' is not only rather a slight sound, but it wobbles about both in print and as it is spoken across different communities.
Poor Letter H, its uses and abuses
was the title of a little book jokily authored by ‘the Hon. Henry H', published in 1859. ‘You can't pass from Kensington to Mile End Gate,' writes the Hon. Henry, ‘without hearing thousands of well-dressed and ill-dressed
people, all alike, inflicting the greatest injuries upon these little letters, whose wrongs I have stepped forward to redress.' Henry travels about incognito and tells us that he has spotted people saying ‘'ock' and ‘'ouses' when they should be saying ‘hock' and ‘houses' and others talking of the ‘haims' and ‘hends' of their projected plans. Henry is pleased to report, however, that things are better in Northumberland, where people get it right.

In the book, the letter ‘H' sends a letter to the vowels (to their home in Alphabet Lodge from his home in Holly House, Hertfordshire) and tells them that he has the most ‘honourable aspirations'. (That's my favourite gag in the book.) ‘I have heard,' says H, ‘the little prattling child tell his mamma that he had “'
urt
his '
and”,
and to my surprise, his mother did not ask him what he meant.'

Are you picking up an ironic tone here? Was the Hon. Henry H someone having his cake and eating it – pretending to be censorious whilst pointing out some of the absurdities of the objectors?

H goes on to say that he's heard high-class and educated people talk about the ‘Hottoman Hempire', and ‘hadvocate' causes when they had no right to mention him (i.e. to use the letter ‘h' in that context). H has heard a ‘shopman' offer a lady a ‘'andsome hopera dress', and a politician talk of ‘hagitate, hagitate, hagitate'. Someone, H claims, once suggested to Rowland Hill, the inventor of the postage stamp, that the letter ‘H' be abolished, to which Hill replied: if that happened, it would make him ‘ill for the rest of his life'.

In his next letter to the vowels, H lays out a chart of correct pronunciation and there we see that he says the following words should not be aspirated: ‘heir', ‘honest', ‘honour', and ‘hour' (as indeed are unaspirated in our speech today), but also ‘herb', ‘hospital' and ‘humble'. All other ‘h' words, he says, should be aspirated.

Put plainly then, if I had wanted to talk ‘correctly' in 1858, I should have said ‘erb', ‘ospital' and ‘umble'. The ‘incorrect' aspiration of those three words somehow became ‘correct' aspiration by the time I was being corrected at school in the 1950s. By what strange processes did these transformations take place?

Much less contentiously, ‘h' is put to work in a lot of other ways too: think ‘ch' and ‘sh'. When it combines with ‘t' to be ‘th', it runs into problems with some elocutionists who try to stamp out Londoners and ‘Estuary' speakers saying ‘free' for ‘three' and ‘fevver' for ‘feather'. My youngest son got so confused by these attempts to match up the ‘f' sound to the letter ‘f' and only the letter ‘f' that he started pronouncing ‘f' words with a ‘th' sound: ‘first' became ‘thirst' and ‘difficult' became ‘dithicult'. These ‘digraphs' (two-letter combinations of letters) do the same job as many of our single letters: they indicate one clear sound. It used to do similar work in ‘wh' as in ‘what', making it all breathy, and it used to do work in ‘gh' as in ‘fight' but the Germanic ‘ch' sound slipped away.

The exclamation ‘ugh' uses ‘gh' to indicate the in-the-throat ‘ch' at the end of ‘loch'. ‘H' appears in ‘rh' as in ‘rhino' and in ‘ph' as in ‘phone' to remind knowledgeable people of their Greek origins and to make life hard for children trying to spell correctly. You can spot ‘h' digraphs in loan words: ‘bh' as in ‘bhindi' (okra or ladies' fingers), ‘dh' as in ‘dhow', ‘kh' as in the name ‘Khan', ‘nh' as in Viet-Minh, and ‘zh' as in ‘muzhik' (a humble Russian peasant), which my mother used to call me in moments of affection. My favourite, though, is ‘yacht' where it pretends to be doing something very useful by doubling up with the ‘c' but ends up not doing very much at all. Modern phonics teaching would say that ‘ach' in ‘yacht' is a way of saying the same sound as ‘o' in ‘hot'.

You could say that ‘H' is not doing a lot when we write ‘oh', because ‘o' sounds just the same as ‘oh'. The other way of looking at that is to say ‘oh' as a digraph does the same kind of work as ‘o' and ‘e' in the ‘split digraph' of ‘hope' but not the same as the ‘oh' in ‘John'. If you think this is complicated, don't blame me. You could say that ‘H' is doing a lot more than the ‘h' in ‘oh' when we write ‘ah', ‘eh' and ‘uh' or even ‘uh-uh', as, some would say, it indicates how we should pronounce the vowel letter. To the new school of teaching, though, they are all digraphs which indicate vowel sounds in themselves. These are sounds not necessarily indicated by the five vowel letters on their own. Using ‘h' to create the digraph ‘ah' tells us how to make this particular vowel sound. Ah, the phonetic philosophy of ‘h'.

The shape of ‘H' has aroused interest because there seems to be a direct lineage from a hieroglyph for a fence, to an old Semitic letter, to Phoenician ‘heth', to Greek ‘heta', to Etruscan and then to Latin.