Edmond,
Thanks for clarifying some matters on h-dropping in BrE. American speakers almost universally say "aitch," not "haitch." H-drop is so much not a factor in American culture that we do actually get the /h/ inserted in "an historic event" in the formal speech of a lot of newsreaders, and people tend to think that that highly irregular form is prescriptively correct. I think that's where this thread started.
I should have added, in my previous note on hit/hits that the form 'em, which works for both "him" and "them" goes back to Old English. Clearly there was voiced th-drop in weak syllables as well.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edmond Wright
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 10:02 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: dropping the h
As regards 'dropping the H', it hasn't so far been mentioned how this was used in England at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century as a supposedly comic marker of class. One might cite a scene in Arthur Pinero's farce 'Dandy Dick' where a butler with a pronounced cockney accent is mocked by the daughters of the vicar who employs him. After a sequence in which he misplaces a whole series of H's (both missing and unnecessarily supplying them), one of the daughters calls out to him in cheeky mimicry as he goes out ". . .and 'ang your Haitches on the 'atstand!"
This item of mockery has now disappeared from the English cultural scene, reflecting the modern sensitivity to such class ridicule. On this account, teachers today refrain from 'correcting' students' pronunciation of the letter, to the point where many teachers, if not most, say 'Haitch'
themselves. It has produced one oddity: the Standard English word for 'H'
is pronounced 'aitch', and this version can be heard daily on television (for example, in the word game 'Countdown', where the Oxford woman graduate who puts letters up on a board always says 'aitch'; it is also still the standard version in the Oxford English Dictionary). However, the television Channel 5 puts on daily a popular sitcom from Australia called 'Neighbours'
in which, should reference to 'H' occur, is always pronounced 'Haitch'. As a result the two versions are at present fighting it out in English speech.
One aspect favouring the final success of the Australian version is the fact that, in adding the 'h', one is providing what linguists call a 'transparency', an aid to memory: the sound 'h' appears in the pronunciation itself (absent from 'aitch').
Am I right in thinking that 'Haitch' is the standard American pronunciation?
Edmond
;
Dr. Edmond Wright
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