Words and Stuff

Is there a more bothersome letter than h? Not for Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl in My Fair Lady who struggled to enunciate her aitches in the sentence ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen.’ Not for many others, either.

Although Eliza first appeared in 1913 in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, she wasn’t the first to hit trouble with this irksome letter. The Victorians, who had firm views about proper behaviour and therefore proper pronunciation, minded their hs as much as their ps and qs.

According to David Crystal in We Are Not Amused, published last year, 96 items about pronunciation appeared in Punch during the Victorian era, with ‘poor little h’ getting far more than its fair share of attention. But then Mr Punch believed that ‘it is a Vulgar Error, a very Vulgar Error, to omit or introduce improperly the letter h in conversation’.

Cockneys were the worst offenders and Punch did its best to put them right, often lamenting the cries of London’s voluble transport workers, such as ‘the conductors of certain omnibuses’ who called out ‘Emma Smith! Emma Smith!’, though they were ‘supposed to mean Hammersmith’.

It was a losing battle. Cockney pronunciations not only endured in England – in 1991 the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, wrote that ‘at the age of seventeen-and-a-half, I discovered the letter h in the English language’ – but spread as far as Australia. In the 1970s, when John Betjeman (some say it was Monica Dickens) was signing copies of his poems in a Sydney bookshop, and duly inscribed a proffered volume with the name ‘Emma Chizzit’, he was embarrassed to learn that this was not what the customer was called but a question about the price.

In Britain at least, a mastery of the correct use of the fully pronounced voiceless glottal fricative, ie the letter h, is an indicator of someone’s education and therefore social class. Awkwardly, it’s not enough just to avoid dropping your hs, you must also avoid inserting them in the wrong places. That’s a matter of heavy breathing. In other words, if you aspire to be posh, you must not aspirate too freely: no haitches, please.

Yet English, even when uttered by those with perfect Received Pronunciation, has no simple rules about when to aspirate and when to hold back. Why aspirated initial letters for most words beginning with h, but silent hs for ‘heir’, ‘hour’, ‘honour’ and ‘honest’? A French background is the answer no doubt, but that would also be true of many words from ‘habit’ to ‘heretic’ to ‘hygiene’.

As it happens, French too has trouble with initial hs. French hs are almost always silent and, as in English, the second letter of most French words beginning with an h is almost always a vowel. That means they get the treatment given to words starting with vowels. But a small class of such words, those said to start with an h aspiré, do not, which is why it’s de haut en bas, not d’haut en bas; ‘the bean’ is le haricot, not l’haricot; Les Halles, the place in Paris, is pronounced Lay Al, not Lez Al; and the beautiful red rose blooming so well this summer is Etoile de Hollande, not Etoile d’hollande.

Though h tends to soften in both French ( tache) and English (loch), it hardens in Italian ( gnocchi, spaghetti). It doesn’t exist in Greek, since its work is done by a ‘rough breathing’, a small mark above an initial vowel. It is, in short, a most peculiar letter, usually silent in the middle of words in Romance languages and, as a capital, the symbol for n in Russian and a long e in Greek. How lucky that Eliza did not aspire to speak anything but English.