Re: How to pronounce the letter "H"

On 2025-06-15, guido wugi <wugi@brol.invalid> wrote:

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.

>
I'd guess, rather /aka/ - /akə/ - ?/akʃə/ - /atʃə/ - /aʃ/ , not? --

Oops, actually, what I _meant_ to write was

  /ka/ > /tʃa/ > /ʃa/

for the generic development of Latin /ka/ in French.  There are
also secondary developments that have shifted the /a/ further in
some cases.

As far *aca, that's likely

  /ˈaka/ > /ˈatʃa/ > /ˈatʃə/ > /aʃə/ > /aʃ/

Presumably Middle English picked up /ˈatʃə/ as /ˈaːtʃə/ and then
you have loss of final schwa and the Great Vowel Shift > /eɪtʃ/.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de