Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.szaf.org!inka.de!mips.inka.de!.POSTED.localhost!not-for-mail From: Christian Weisgerber Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: How to pronounce the letter "H" Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2025 17:56:31 -0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: <1025s5e$ccf2$2@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2025 17:56:31 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: lorvorc.mips.inka.de; posting-host="localhost:::1"; logging-data="35717"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@mips.inka.de" User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (FreeBSD) On 2025-06-09, Tilde wrote: > APRIL 15, 2024 > > Rajan found himself at the centre of a > linguistic storm when he was criticised by > viewers for saying "haitch" rather than "aitch", > an approach described as "horrible with a capital > aitch" on social media and "truly awful" in a > newspaper letters page. The more interesting question is why H is called "aitch" in the first place. Well, that is prime evidence that English took the names of the letters from French, so Old French "ache"--/ˈatʃə/, I think--was borrowed into Middle English and then underwent the soundshifts to Present Day English. English of course has an /h/ sound, so there would have been no reason not to use that as the initial sound of the name for the letter H if English speakers had named it themselves. The original Latin name was /ha/, but /h/ was already unstable in Classical Latin and dropped out completely on the way to Romance, causing Proto-Romance speakers to come up with *aca or *acca, as evidenced by its reflexes all over Italo-Western-Romance. The shift Latin /ak/ > /atʃ/ > /aʃ/ is highly specific to French, though. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de