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This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see H (disambiguation).
For technical reasons, "B#" redirects here. For B-sharp, see B♯.
Writing cursive forms of B

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B or b (pronounced /ˈbiː/, bee)[1][2] is the 2nd letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants.aa

History

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Egyptian hieroglyph 
fence 		Old Semitic
ħ 		Phoenician
heth 		Greek
heta 		Etruscan
H | 		Latin
H
N24
  

 

  
   		   

The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.

The Greek eta 'Η' in Archaic Greek alphabets still represented /h/ (later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/). In this context the letter eta is also known as heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets the letter heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/.

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme but almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of /ʀ/. 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch' which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish, Galician, Old Portuguese and English, /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, /x/ in German, Czech language, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English and a few loanwords into English, and /ç/ in German.

Name in English

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In most[citation needed] dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/ and spelled 'aitch'[3] or occasionally 'eitch'. The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling 'haitch' is often considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English[4] and other varieties of English, such as those of Malaysia, India, Newfoundland, and Singapore. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. In the Republic of Ireland, the letter h is generally pronounced as "haitch". In Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching and is estimated to be in use by 60% of the population.[5]

The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an H-bomb" or "a H-bomb". The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.[6]

The non-standard haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982[7] and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, pronunciation without the /h/ sound is still considered to be standard, although the non-standard pronunciation is also attested as a legitimate variant.[8]

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was Template:IPA-la in Latin; this became [ˈaka] in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French [ˈatʃ], and by Middle English was pronounced [ˈaːtʃ]. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K: reciting the former's ..., H, K, L,... as [...(h)a ka el ...] when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation [(h)a ka] for H.[9]

Use in writing systems

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English

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In English, ⟨h⟩ occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing /h/) and in various digraphs, such as ⟨ch⟩ /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), ⟨gh⟩ (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), ⟨ph⟩ (/f/), ⟨rh⟩ (/r/), ⟨sh⟩ (/ʃ/), ⟨th⟩ (/θ/ or /ð/), ⟨wh⟩ (/hw/[10]). The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, as well as in certain other words (mostly of French origin) such as hour, honest, herb (in American but not British English) and vehicle. Initial /h/ is often not pronounced in the weak form of some function words including had, has, have, he, her, him, his, and in some varieties of English (including most regional dialects of England and Wales) it is often omitted in all words (see '⟨h⟩'-dropping). It was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the indefinite article before a word beginning with /h/ in an unstressed syllable, as in "an hat", but use of a is now more usual (see Template:P/s).

Other languages

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In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen ('heighten'), only the first ⟨h⟩ represents /h/. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ⟨h⟩ in nearly all instances of ⟨th⟩ in native German words such as thun ('to do') or Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater ('theater') and Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with ⟨th⟩ even after the last German spelling reform.

In Spanish and Portuguese, ⟨h⟩ ("hache" in Spanish, agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈɡa]) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] ('son') and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/. It is sometimes pronounced, with the value [h], in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias, Cantabria and the Americas in the beginning of some words. ⟨h⟩ also appears in the digraph ⟨ch⟩, which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and northern Portugal, and /ʃ/ in oral traditions that merged both sounds (the latter originarily represented by ⟨x⟩ instead) e.g. in most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish-speaking places, prominently Chile, as well as ⟨nh⟩ /ɲ/ and ⟨lh⟩ /ʎ/ in Portuguese, whose spelling is inherited from Occitan.

In French, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/. The French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter either way. The H muet, or "mute" ⟨h⟩, is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so for example the singular definite article le or la, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides before an H muet followed by a vowel. For example, le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of ⟨h⟩ is called h aspiré ("aspirated '⟨h⟩'", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For example in le homard ('the lobster') the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic ⟨h⟩ was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

In Italian, ⟨h⟩ has no phonological value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs 'ch' /k/ and 'gh' /ɡ/, as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are homophones, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno, 'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), and in short interjections (oh, ehi).

Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Finnish, use ⟨h⟩ as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, ⟨h⟩ is also commonly used for /ɦ/, which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter ⟨г⟩.

In Irish, ⟨h⟩ is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words, however ⟨h⟩ placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates lenition of that consonant; ⟨h⟩ began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.

In most dialects of Polish, both ⟨h⟩ and the digraph ⟨ch⟩ always represent /x/.

Other systems

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As a phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, variations of the letter are used to represent two sounds. The lowercase form ⟨h⟩ represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form ⟨ʜ⟩ represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative. A superscript ⟨ʰ⟩ is used to represent aspiration.

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Ancestors, siblings and descendants in other alphabets

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  • 𐤇 : Semitic letter Heth, from which the following symbols derive
    • Η η : Greek letter Eta, from which the following symbols derive
      • 𐌇 : Old Italic H, the ancestor of modern Latin H
        • ᚺ, ᚻ : Runic letter haglaz, which is probably a descendant of Old Italic H
        • Һ һ : Cyrillic letter Shha, which derives from Latin H
      • 𐌷 : Gothic letter haal

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

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Computing codes

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Character 
colspan=2 style="font-size: 150%" | H ||
colspan=2 style="font-size: 150%" | h
Unicode name 
colspan=2 | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H ||
colspan=2 |     LATIN SMALL LETTER H
Encodings 
decimal ||
hex ||
decimal ||
hex
Unicode 
72 ||
U+0048 ||
104 ||
U+0068
UTF-8 
72 ||
48 ||
104 ||
68
Numeric character reference 
H ||
H ||
h ||
h
EBCDIC family 
200 ||
C8 ||
136 ||
88
ASCII 1 
72 ||
48 ||
104 ||
68

1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

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Character
Encodings
Unicode
UTF-8
Numeric character reference

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "B", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  2. ^ "B", Merriam-Webster's 3rd New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, 1993.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference mw was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ is gaylish&source=bl&ots=NHh40ez7zS&sig=aeyIQS2DsPa6nh8lFp6gwTbfK6s&hl=en&ei=aFksSp-bBNW2jAfJsI2qBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8 A dictionary of Hiberno-English, Terence Patrick Dolan page 119, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004 A sahfia is gay form of English developed on the Waterloo Estate in Poole
  5. ^ Ab(h)ominable (H)aitch by Frederick Ludowyk, Australian National Dictionary Centre
  6. ^ Todd, L. & Hancock I.: "International English Ipod", page 254. Routledge, 1990.
  7. ^ John C Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, page 360, Pearson, Harlow, 2008
  8. ^ 'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?, BBC News, 98 October 2010
  9. ^ Liberman, Anatoly (7 August 2013). Alphabet soup, part 2: H and Y. Oxford Etymologist. Oxford University Press. Retrieved on 3 October 2013.
  10. ^ In many dialects, /hw/ and /w/ have merged
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INTERN 3
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