Pronunciation of letter h6/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Relics of the formerly unvoiced -h- persist in pedantic insistence on an historical (object) and in obsolete mine host. Thus Modern English has words ultimately from Latin with missing -h- ( able, from Latin habile) with a silent -h- ( heir, hour) with a formerly silent -h- now often vocalized ( humble, humor, herb) and even a few with an unetymological -h- fitted in confusion to words that never had one ( hostage, hermit). The sound became totally silent in Vulgar Latin and in the languages that emerged from it thus the letter was omitted in Old French and Italian, but it was restored pedantically in French and Middle English spelling, and often later in English pronunciation. In Germanic it was used for the voiceless breath sound when at the beginning of words, and in the middle or at the end of words for the rough guttural sound, which later came to be written -gh. Subsequently in Greek it came to be used for a long "e" sound the "h" sound being indicated by a fragment of the letter, which later was reduced to the aspiration mark. In Greek at first it had the value of Modern English -h-, and with this value it passed into the Latin alphabet via Greek colonies in Italy. ![]() In Phoenician it originally had a rough guttural sound like German Reich or Scottish loch. Eighth letter of the alphabet it comes from Phoenician, via Greek and Latin.
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