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
Subject: Dropping the h
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 12:20 PM
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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