It would be worth looking up “herb” in the Dictionary of American Regional English. Your library may have it. Even our small town library does, which impressed me. DARE would give the distribution of pronunciations.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 10:20 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dropping the h
For the record, I have been pronouncing the /h/ in 'herb' all my life - 'erb' sounds so odd to my weird ears. I'm not British, but I do believe the Brits do pronounce the /h/. I'm a native New Yorker (N.Y. City), but I don't know that my pronunciation is typically New York-ish. Anybody know about this? Also, is this really a grammar question? Even if it isn't, it's interesting.
Paul
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (_Twelfth Night_ 3.4.127-128).
________________________________
From: Carol Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tue, August 30, 2011 9:25:16 AM
Subject: Re: Dropping the h
Thank, you Herb! This is very informative. I was thinking that you probably pronounce the /h/ in "Herb" but it is not prounounced in "herbs" as in "herbs and spices."
Best-
Carol
--- On Mon, 8/29/11, STAHLKE, HERBERT F <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
From: STAHLKE, HERBERT F <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: Dropping the h
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, August 29, 2011, 11:45 PM
Here’s a short treatment of initial <h> in English. I’m taking a historical approach to the problem in part out of inclination—I do historical linguistics, but I also think understanding why orthographic initial <h> behaves a little oddly in English requires understanding its history. In this discussion, I’m using the linguistic conventions of // to identify sounds and <> to identify letters.
/h/ deletion is a bit messy. One of the fundamental discoveries and principles of historical linguistics is that sound change is regular. If a sound changes, it changes all across the language, not just in some words. For example, English /t/ has deleted consistently between a fricative (/th, f, s/) and /l/ or /n/, as in “listen,” “whistle,” “wrestle,” “often,” etc. However, social and other external pressures can interfere with this regularity, and that’s what’s happened with English initial /h/. Old English had initial /h/ in words like “horse,” “heart,” “hand,” “hound,” and many others and did not drop it. /h/ dropping didn’t begin till well after the Norman invasion and was influenced by French spelling. English borrowed lots of French words spelled with initial <h>, a sound that was not, and is not today, pronounced in French. In fact, those initial <h> had never been pronounced, not even when they originated in Latin, as most of them did. So the words were borrowed without the initial /h/ sound but were spelled with the letter <h>.
As literacy spread, English speakers who did not speak French confronted initial <h> that were pronounced and initial <h> that were not. We still have this in words like “honor,” “honest,” and “hour,” all French loans that have remained /h/-less, unlike “hotel” and “hospital,” French loans that have gained an initial /h/. The initial <h> that are now pronounced in loan words are examples of what’s called “spelling pronunciation,” the same force that leads people to pronounce the <t> in “often” or the <l> in “almond.” Spelling pronunciation applies haphazardly. It’s not a form of regular sound change. Rather, it a kind of hyper-correction. In many cases, the initial /h/ has come to be accepted as standard, as in “history”; in others it has not.
The difference between “an historic event,” without the /h/, and “a history of English,” with the /h/, shows how the /h/-less pronunciation of the loanword would lead to the use of the indefinite “an” and the definite /Di/, which sounds like “thee.” What has happened with some words, like “history,” is that they have sounded the initial <h> through spelling pronunciation, and this change then analogizes to the adjective form so that it too is consonant-initial and takes the indefinite “a.”
/h/-insertion, in those dialects of BrE English that have it, and this covers most of England, is a form of hypercorrection. The speaker knows that in BBC English, for example, some <h> are pronounced and some are not, but the speaker doesn’t know which are which, and so he or she will tend to omit /h/ unless the word is emphasized, in which case an /h/ gets inserted whether it’s there in BBC English or not. Like other examples of hypercorrection, this is not a rule-governed, regular phonological pattern. It varies with speakers and occasions.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Catledge
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 12:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Dropping the h
My MS Word did not like most of the discussion and left only a few sentences legible.
For this reason I may be repeating what others have said; if so , my apology.
I keep the ‘h’ in “the historical” and drop it in “an historical.” I say “a history.” Why do
I not say “an history.” The very presence of ‘an’ tells me that the ‘h’ in historical is
silent—but why? I cannot think of another phrase comparable to “an historical”
except ‘an hysterical.”
Can you?
Norman Scott Catledge, PhD/STD
Professor Emeritus
history & languages
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