Re: How to pronounce the letter "H"

On 2025-06-09, Tilde <invalide@invalid.invalid> 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.
>