Aitch: When a Letter Loses Its Phonetic ’ead but Gains an Orthographic Foothold

Cross-linguistically, the speech sound represented by the letter Aitch is well known for its phonetic acts of disappearance. In one way or another, from Modern Turkish and Russian to some Dravidian languages spoken in India, to a variety of Dutch and Swedish dialects, /h/ goes silent. In ancient Greek, and again in ancient Latin, this voiceless glottal fricative dematerialized, a phonological gap retained in Modern Greek and still characteristic of today’s Romance languages. And in native English phonology, “/h/-dropping” has a long and very checkered history. The compounded losses of /h/ in Greek, Latin, French and English have encouraged the letter associated with this sound to be semiotically repurposed in surprisingly diverse ways. Understanding how a contronymic letter name like Aitch could result from forfeiting the very sound it is supposed to name demonstrates just how phonetically vulnerable /h/ is; appreciating how the letter Aitch could then reappear at the end of Aitch demonstrates just how much English spelling has come to rely on its orthographic support. This chapter traces the phonetic disappearance of the /h/ in its own letter name while tracking the reappearances of as the single most frequent letter across an extended series of consonantal multigraphs.